Mary Magdalene Praying in a Landscape

This drawing appears, given its style, to date to sometime around 1650, and, on that basis, Nicholas Turner has linked it to a Penitent Magdalene painted in 1651-52 (private collection, on loan to the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia). That painting, however, which has been alternately attributed to Cesare Gennari rather than Guercino himself, shows an animated Magdalene with her arms thrust into the air, framed by the mouth of a cave-motifs that do not appear in the Morgan drawing. The case may be that the highly finished drawing was not, strictly speaking, a preparatory study, but rather an end in itself, akin to other red chalk studies from Guercino's later career (see IV, 168g and 2009.159). -- Catalog entry: Guercino : virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 104