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| Guercino Cleopatra and Octavian ca. 1640 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Guercino Christ and the Samaritan Woman ca. 1640-41 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Guercino St Jerome in the Desert 1641 oil on canvas Pinacoteca - Museo Civico di Rimini |
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| Guercino Flagellation of Christ ca. 1641-44 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
"International fame was the consequence of papal patronage, but an invitation to become court painter to Charles I, the connoisseur king of England, was refused in no uncertain terms. Guercino's earliest biographer, Carlo Malvasia (1678) tells us that "he did not wish to accept the opportunity, having no desire to converse with heretics, nor to contaminate the goodness of his angelic habits, nor to expose himself to a climate so remote from his own people." It was not the weather that deterred him, but the thought of living among Protestants, for Guercino's paintings are informed by the passionate fervour of the Counter-Reformation, conforming in aesthetic terms with the Jesuit argument that all the senses should be engaged in empathy with the events of martyrdom and ecstasy."
"How could any painter so famous in his day – Louis XIII of France was next to invite him to become court painter, and when Velázquez visited him in Cento he may well have carried an invitation from Philip IV of Spain, and his paintings and drawings were avidly collected by English Grand Tourists throughout the 18th century – have been so abruptly discarded from the canon of great painters? For this, John Ruskin is to blame, for it was he who damned Guercino as "partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous" in a campaign against Italian painters of "the school of errors and vices." In this view he was widely accepted, the consequences disastrous for the National Gallery, where Ruskin condemned works by Guido Reni as "not worth sixpence" and begged the director to stop buying them. For the best part of a century the gallery bought no more pictures of this kind, and not even Kenneth Clark in the 1930s was prepared to contend with this aesthetic prohibition. Roger Fry, Ruskin's successor in the 20th century as the nation's most fashionable critic, must also share the blame, for as the prime apologist for Parisian modernism, his contempt for Italian Baroque painting was even more influential, and remained so long after his death in 1934."
– from a newspaper review (London Evening Standard) of a Guercino exhibition mounted at the Courtauld Institute in 2007
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| Guercino St Romuald 1642 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Comunale di Ravenna |
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| Guercino Hersilia separating Romulus and Tatius 1645 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Guercino Semiramis called to Arms 1645 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Guercino Atlas 1646 oil on canvas Museo Bardini, Florence |
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| Guercino Saul attacking David 1646 oil on canvas Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
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| Guercino St Peter weeping before the Virgin 1647 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Guercino Erminia and the Shepherds 1648-49 oil on canvas Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Guercino St Cecilia 1649 oil on canvas Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
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| Guercino Death of Cleopatra 1648 oil on canvas Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa |
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| Guercino Penitent Magdalen 1649 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Guercino Joseph and Potiphar's Wife 1649 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Guercino Amnon and Tamar 1649-50 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |