(Rome 1695–1741)
A wooded river landscape crossed by a bridge with resting shepherds; and
A wooded river landscape with a hilltop town beyond and various figures,
oil on canvas, each 33 x 67 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
Private European collection

We are grateful to Kelly Galvagni for confirming the attribution after examining the present paintings in the original and for her help in cataloguing this lot.

These two canvases dating to the 1730s, are amongst the most characteristic works of Andrea Locatelli and are exemplary records of the eighteenth-century fashion for Arcadian landscapes – a genre that by the early years of that century had gained considerable popularity among the nobility and cultural elites of the era.

The figures animating these views belong to the typical repertoire of Locatelli’s production – rendered with swift strokes of the brush, their somewhat heavy-set forms play out scenes from daily life. In one view, the white horse in the foreground is comparable to that in the Landscape with shepherds and a rider on horseback formerly in the collection of Cardinale Giuseppe Pozzobonelli (oil on canvas, 74 x 56.7 cm, Milan, Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini); while the other view can be compared to the Landscape with figures, a river, bridge and fortress in the Museo di Casa Martelli, Florence (inv. no. 26) which reveals a similar planar construction composed around a winding river crossed by a bridge and a quadrangular tower on the right flanked by a second, taller, cylindrical tower. The latter may have been inspired by the Mausoleum of the Plauti at Tivoli.

Andrea Locatelli is considered one of the most important exponents of Roman landscape painting of the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1715 he was commissioned to decorate a room in the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome: 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 families such as the Colonna and the Borghese and he worked for the royal courts at 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. His works serve as the counterpoint to those of the other great landscape painters in Rome active during the first half of the eighteenth century, such as Jan Frans van Bloemen.