Works by Guercino

The early paintings of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino or 'the squinter', are often tumultuous and deep in shadow; his later works move toward a calm, classical balance.

He grew up in a farming family in Cento, between Bologna and Ferrara, and was mostly self-taught, apart from an apprenticeship at sixteen with Benedetto Gennari. Samson Captured by the Philistines, painted in 1619 for the papal legate to Ferrara, is already starkly naturalistic in the manner of Caravaggio, though he is unlikely to have seen Caravaggio's pictures in Rome by then. Samson's bare back twists at the centre as soldiers in armour pile onto him, while a woman at left grips a white cloth.

Pope Gregory XV called him to Rome, where he spent 1621 to 1623. In his portrait of the pope, the old man sits at a green-covered table with an open book, tired and pale. When Guido Reni died in 1642, Guercino took his busy studio to Bologna and stepped into Reni's place as the city's main painter of sacred subjects; some of his later works move toward Reni, with more light and clarity than the early ones. In Joseph and Potiphar's Wife of 1649, Joseph turns away from the bed with one hand raised against her, and a sweep of bright blue cloth crosses the foreground.

Drawings make up about half of the works below. Hercules, drawn in pen in 1641–42, sets long, loose strokes for the lion skin against short, tight ones for the face. He kept such sheets largely to himself; collectors prized them only after his death.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.