River Landscape
Annibale Carraccic. 1590
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Washington, DC, United States
It might be said that with paintings like this one, Annibale Carracci invented the landscape as a subject for Italian baroque painting. Nature here is appreciated first and foremost for herself and not as the backdrop for a story. A mellow sunlight dapples the land and picks out the ripples disturbing the surface of the river. The gold in the treetops suggests a day in early autumn. Brightly clad in red and white, a boatman poles his craft through the shallow water.
In the company of his brother Agostino and his cousin Lodovico Carracci, Annibale made excursions into the country in order to sketch the landscape. From these quick studies made on the spot he worked up his paintings in the studio. The resulting composition is an artful balancing of forms. As the river wends its way through the countryside towards the foreground, the spits of land that chart its course are made to recede and project in an alternating rhythm of triangles. Trees, like signposts, mark the progress of recession into the distance. At the same time the bold strokes of dark trees in the foreground form a dramatic pattern on the surface to snap the spectator's attention back from the hazy blue of the distant horizon.
More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication_ Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries_, which is available as a free PDF <u>https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/italian-paintings-17th-and-18th-centuries.pdf</u>
- Title: River Landscape
- Creator: Annibale Carracci
- Date Created: c. 1590
- Physical Dimensions: overall: 88.3 x 148.1 cm (34 3/4 x 58 5/16 in.) framed: 116.8 x 175.6 x 8.9 cm (46 x 69 1/8 x 3 1/2 in.)
- Provenance: Sir John Rushout, 6th bt. and 2nd baron Northwick [1770-1859], Northwick Park, near Moreton-in-the-Marsh, originally Worcestshire, now Gloucestershire, and Thirlestane House, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire; (sale, Phillips, Thirlestane House, 26 July-16 August 1859, no. 412, as by Velázquez); Mrs. Garcia, London. William Heathcote, London, by 1883.[1] (sale, Sotheby's, London, 24 June 1931, no. 31, as by Velázquez); Malcolm.[2] (F. Kleinberger & Co, New York and Paris); sold half interest 25 November 1947 to (Durlacher Brothers, New York);[3] purchased 19 May 1948 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1952 to NGA. [1] The Knoedler British Sales microfiche copy of the 1859 Northwick sale catalogue includes a marginal notation that the painting was subsequently purchased by Heathcote; a note at the beginning of the catalogue indicates that these corrections were taken from a "priced and named list" in the possession of the auctioneer, Mr. Phillips. C.B. Curtis, _Velázquez and Murillo_, London, 1883: 29, repeats this information. [2] The Sotheby's catalogue lists the purchaser as Malcolm, about whom nothing is known. [3] Durlacher Gallery papers, Accession no. 95003, Series II, box 17, no. DK-1 (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; copies in NGA curatorial files). [4] Kress Foundation records, in NGA curatorial files. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1770.
- Medium: oil on canvas
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