Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino

This is a marvelously expressive and poetic example of one of Guercino's landscape drawings. A rare subject in his painted oeuvre, it was instead a genre that he frequently pursued with pen and paper. Throughout his career, Guercino executed landscapes of every variety, mainly in the medium of pen and ink, with a few exceptions, executed purely in wash. These beautiful sheets must be regarded as works of art in their own right and the surviving examples provide a wonderful insight into Guercino's skill and handling of line.

Most of his landscapes are a combination of fantasy and reality, using his own imagination together with landscape motifs that he observed in and around his native town of Cento. The present landscape demonstrates Guercino's conveyance of great depth and recession within his compositions. With economy of line and subtle gradations of tone we are able to traverse the terrain, our eye drawn across the sheet from the seated figures in the foreground to the soldiers spearing serpents and then on to the summit of the rocky outcrop and the rolling landscape beyond.

The late Sir Denis Mahon confirmed the attribution to Guercino, on the basis of a photograph, to the previous owner in 1984 and Professor David Stone (loc. cit.) subsequently endorsed this when comparing the present work and its configuration of rocks and mountains to the artist's splendid drawing, Shepherds Peering into a Chasm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.