Landscape with fishermen and travellers, oil on canvas, 96 x 134 cm, framed

We are grateful to Professor Caterina Volpi for confirming the attribution after examining the present painting in the original.

The present river landscape, framed by a rocky crag on the right and a characteristic gnarled tree on the left, with clearly visible roots, is part of a series of rural landscapes, river and seascapes paintings produced by Salvator Rosa from his youth in Naples onwards with increasing success and in extensive variations, also during his artist production in Florence and Rome between the 1630s and 1660s.

From his earliest landscape paintings featuring fishermen or card players produced in Naples (Coral Fishermen, Columbia Museum of Art, Kress Foundation; Marine, Naples, Museo di San Martino), Salvator Rosa specialised in landscape painting, becoming increasingly recognized in his native city with influential painters, as well as those from further afield such as Lanfranco (see B. De Dominici, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, ed. by F. Sricchia Santoro and A. Zezza, Naples 2008, vol. 3, pp. 413/14). Soon Salvator Rosa’s reputation spread beyond the confines of Naples.

His talents as a landscape painter led to him being called upon to contribute to the cycle of paintings for the Buen Retiro Palace (Salvator Rosa, exhibition catalogue edited by H. Langdon, X. Salomon and C. Volpi, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kimbell Art Museum, 2010, no. 9), after which he moved to Rome and then to Florence, to the court of Giovan Carlo de Medici. The numerous seascapes from the Florentine period (the great Marine paintings kept at the Palazzo Pitti and the Marina delle torri produced for Giovan Battista Ricciardi, now hanging in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence) reveal a form of painterly softness linked to the influence of his contact with the works of Filippo Napoletano and Claude Lorrain in Rome in 1639.

In 1650, now permanently living in Rome, Rosa developed a new and highly personalised style of landscape painting, with intense chiaroscuro effects, characteristic skies traversed by clouds, tuffaceous rocks and leafy trees with broken trunks. Rosa painted two landscapes for the Guadagni family in 1656: River Landscape with Saint John the Baptist and The Baptism in Jordan, Glasgow, Art Gallery). Also from this period are a River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl (London, Wallace Collection) and Bandits on a Rocky Coast (New York, Metropolitan Museum).

The present painting dates from the same period and is comparable in many ways to the aforementioned landscapes. Volpi states that this painting is a work from the artist’s full maturity and can also be compared to the Woodland Scene with Three Philosophers (L. Salerno, L’opera completa di Salvator Rosa, Milan 1975, no. 161) and the Landscape with Soldiers in Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle (L. Salerno, op. cit., no. 162), which have all been dated to between 1656 and 1660.

We are grateful to Professor Volpi for her help in cataloguing the present painting.