Pair Country Scenes, italian school of the 18th century

I examined with keen interest this pair of paintings depicting pleasant and tasty "Country Scenes " (Paintings oil on panel, 33 x 26 cm without frames and 50 x 42 cm with beautiful period frames), with fishermen working at dawn given the orange tone of the skies, some preparing their nets and others landing with a barge ready for work with a delightful landscape background, well painted and of great pictorial quality in both details and colors.

The impromptu "entertainment" in the pair is set on the clearing of a wooded slope, sloping down to the valley floor traversed by a river, nestled between high and steep banks. A spacious and luminous "Landscape," hinging on the central presence of a bridge with a built-up area that explicates a clear inspiration from the Latium countryside, probably along the upper Tiber valley. At the same time, its pictorial characterization leads us directly back to the manners of Roman specialists, active in Rome in the first half of the 18th century, from Andrea Locatelli and Jan Frans van Bloemen to Paolo Anesi and Paolo Monaldi.

Precisely the types, physiognomic and gestural, of these masters with the addition of an almost Flemish pictorial precision make me think of an artist like Giovanni Battista Busiri ( Rome 1698 - 1757 ).

The artist, in his repeated "pastorellerie," generally expounds a meticulous description of the customs and habits of the rural world of Latium, observed, however, more in their daily work commitments than in their amusements, and always proposed in a disengaged Arcadian key, with pertinent pictorial and expressive preciousness, already largely participatory and representative of the Rococo.

An interpretative angle that constitutes a decisive aspect of the artistic personality of Busiri, who, despite his constant adherence to his contemporary popular sphere, affirms a substantial alignment with the aesthetic refinement of his Flemish cousins, with not infrequently references that are circumstantial and not just generic.