Sancho Departs for the Island of Barataria

Around 1730−40, the Brussels workshop of Peter Van den Hecke produced a series of eight tapestries illustrating Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Six of them— including this panel—were inspired by engravings made between 1723 and 1734 after twenty-seven cartoons, or preparatory works, painted by the French painter Charles Coypel to serve as models for tapestries produced at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. In Sancho Departs for the Isle of Barataria, the composition is organized around Don Quixote embracing Sancho, dressed in a red overcoat and holding a white turban. Rather than faithfully copying Coypel’s scenes, the painter who provided cartoons for Van den Hecke borrowed elements from the celebrated engravings and set them into landscapes reminiscent of seventeenth-century northern Dutch paintings. Soon after it was made, this panel was acquired by the French Royal Collection. In 1749, it was displayed at the Château de Compiègne in the study of the eldest son of King Louis XV, Louis, Dauphin of France.

Source: Vignon, Charlotte. The Frick Collection Decorative Arts Handbook. New York: The Frick Collection/Scala, 2015.

French royal collection, Paris, recorded in 1775. Possibly collection of the Vicomte de Fontarce, Paris, c. 1900. Hubert Mersmann, Los Martines, Granada, Spain. Henry Clay Frick, 1909. Childs Frick, Rosalyn, Long Island. Bequeathed by him in 1965.

Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints & Later Acquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.