(Rome 1695–1741)
A bucolic landscape with shepherds and their flock,
signed with monogram lower left (strengthened): AL,
oil on canvas, 97.5 x 137 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection (acquired by the grandfather of the present owner)

Literature:
A. Busiri Vici, Andrea Locatelli e il paesaggio romano del Settecento, Rome 1976, s. p., no. 289 (as Andrea Locatelli)

The present painting is a characteristic work by Andrea Locatelli, one of the most important exponents of Roman landscape painting. The composition is an example of the eighteenth-century fashion for Arcadian landscapes, a genre that by the early years of the century had gained considerable popularity among the nobility and cultural elites of the era.

The artist depicts a landscape opening out into the distance, framed on both sides by trees, with country folk dressed as archaic figures, reminiscent of Roman sculpture, which give the composition a classicising character. Together with the skillfully orchestrated interplay of light and shadow and the fine, but rapid brushstrokes, the composition transmits an elegant atmosphere.

Andrea Locatelli was commissioned to decorate a room in the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome in 1715: this was the first of several important decorative schemes that he was to execute. Initially, he concentrated on river and coastal landscapes, while later, taking inspiration from the work of Gaspar Dughet, he increasingly turned to painting idyllic views of the Roman Campagna and mythological scenes set in Arcadian landscapes.

Locatelli worked for important patrons such as the Colonna and the Borghese as well as the courts of Turin and Madrid. The luminosity of his landscapes supplied an important model to Giovanni Paolo Panini and are a signal point of reference to the younger generation of painters including Hubert Robert, Paolo Anesi and Paolo Monaldi.