Landscape with Farmers and Woodsmen

Marco Ricci’s itinerant career makes it difficult to place him into a single school of art. While training in Venice with his uncle, Sebastiano Ricci, another important painter, in the 1690s, young Marco murdered a gondolier in a bar fight and fled to Dalmatia. Later he worked in Milan, Florence, Rome, the Netherlands, and England, before returning to Venice some twenty years later, in 1716. Back in Venice, he forged a successful career as a stage set designer, landscape painter, and etcher. Here, Ricci depicts farmers gathering fruit and woodsmen transporting logs in a resplendent forest. To evoke the dappled bright light of a summer day, he utilizes the white of the page, illuminating passages of the tree trunks and ground throughout. His novel combination of realism and theatricality made him a popular and influential artist.