Provenance

Up to the present the earliest known reference to the National Gallery cartoons is in Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun's ‘Recueil de Gravures au Trait’, his illustrated sale catalogue of 1809 (note 21). They were acquired by him in 1807 or 1808, almost certainly in Italy. It remains surprising that no earlier reference to the cartoons has yet been found since the fact that they were mounted on canvas, apparently in the seventeenth century, means that they were intended to be displayed. The history of the Urbino cartoon, which appears to have a seventeenth-century canvas lining too, is, on the other hand, well-known: it belonged to Domenichino, then to his pupil Raspantino and it hung for some years as a prized possession in the studio of Carlo Maratti's house in Rome (note 22). The National Gallery cartoons were acquired by Sir Thomas Lawrence. They passed to Samuel Woodburn and were bought from him by Lord Francis Egerton (later Earl of Ellesmere) who presented them to the National Gallery in 1837.

From Technical Bulletin: The Conservation of the Carracci Cartoons