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Dimensions: 71.6 by 134 cm.; 28 1/4 by 52 3/4 in.

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Notes: Writing in his Notizie Rosa's contemporary Filippo Baldinucci (1625-97) described his ability as a landscape painter in glowing terms: 'There is no doubt among connoisseurs that Salvator was indeed the most remarkable artist ever to have painted landscapes...in the eyes of many he was the first to discover how to use different shades to show the different colours which water takes on when touched with light, changing in the sea or flowing rivers or waterfalls or in lakes and swamps, or when it is intruded upon by solid objects, buildings, crags, trees or reeds, or when it is hidden or flows into caves in the clifffs or whirlpools....He is equally to be praised.....for the colouring of his landscapes with a touch that is all sweetness and entirely realistic. This especially true of his distant views..... Look at his ways of painting the open country side...both in the foreground and in the distance, and the clever ways in which always suits the actions and gestures of his little figures to the subject of the painting'

Hitherto apparently unrecorded and unpublished, this landscape is most likely a relatively early landscape by Rosa, painted towards the end of or just after his sojourn in Florence between 1640 and 1649. It is clearly related stylistically to the landscapes he produced around 1641-45 for his patron Giovanni Carlo de' Medici, such as the Landscape with travellers asking the way (London, Sir Denis Mahon) but its slightly greater sophistication, especially in the gradation of tones in the distance, suggest that its author had seen the work of Claude Lorrain in Rome, where Rosa had arrived in 1650. Other comparable landscapes from this latter period include the Landscape with resting figures in the Methuen Collection at Corsham Court, Wiltshire (reproduced in J. Scott, Salvator Rosa. His Life and Times, New Haven and London 1995, p. 202, fig. 213) and the signed Saint Anthony preaching to the fishes now at Althorp (L. Salerno, Salvatopr Rosa, Milan 1963, fig. 21). The figures and animals in the present work may also be compared to those in another signed work, the Justice departing from the shepherds which has been dated to both Rosa's Florentine and Roman periods (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, reproduced Scott, op.cit., p. 44, fig. 52).