Drawing of the Day: A Pulcinella Booth, 17th-18th C.

A Pulcinella Show
17th-18th C.
The Victoria & Albert Museum

This beautiful work of ink and watercolor dates sometime between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and depicts Mr. Punch’s Italian cousin, Pulcinella, as performed within a lovely shell-blue booth.

Now part of the George Speaight Archive at the V&A, the illustration’s exact age and provenance are unknown, but it’s almost certainly Italian—not only because of the subject, but because of the gentle and loose style in which it is rendered.