Marco Ricci

Private collection, Switzerland;
Private collection, Germany

Pfäffikon, Seedamm-Kulturzentrum, and Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Venezianische Kunst in der Schweiz und in Liechtenstein, 1978, p. 173, no. 151, reproduced

A. Scarpa Sonino, Marco Ricci, Milan 1991, p. 154, no. 72, reproduced p. 297, fig. 238

Laid down on cardboard . Overall in good condition, colours fresh. Some small losses of pigments around the margins and lower right in the area near the corner and along the right margin and to the left margin in the area by the small tree to the left.
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As Annalisa Scarpa Sonino pointed out in her entry on this gouache (see Literature), Marco Ricci treated the subject of hermits in a landscape, in a number of variants, on several occasions over the course of his career.  The present work can be closely related to two gouaches, formerly in Consul Smith’s collection and now at Windsor Castle,¹ and also to two pen and ink drawings, both also at Windsor, which show a monk praying in a landscape.²   As Scarpa Sonino points out, these works by Ricci demonstrate the influence of Magnasco, whom Ricci had met and with whom he collaborated during his Tuscan sojourn, in 1704-7.³

Small paintings of this type, executed in tempera or gouache, generally on a kidskin support, have been prized by collectors ever since the eighteenth century.  Although Ricci experimented with this medium fairly early in his career, it was during the last fifteen years of his life that he produced the majority of his works executed using this attractive and luminous technique.  The landscapes, hilly or mountainous, are always arranged in receding planes, dramatically enriched by rocks and trees, while the almost incidental figures, generally placed in the foreground, are totally overwhelmed by the powerful nature surrounding them, creating effects not unlike those produced in the very successful, large landscapes painted by Salvator Rosa in the previous century.

¹  Inv. nos. 3108, 3097;  Scarpa Sonino, op. cit., nos. t 102, t 116, reproduced figs. 236, 240
²  Inv. nos. 5838, 01139; ibid., figs, 239 and 241
³  Ibid., p. 117, no. 14