ART SELECTION

River Landscape with Shepherdess and Ruins

Oil on canvas. Signed " Schütz fecit" on the ruin to the right of the shepherdess. Christian Georg Schütz the Elder captures an idyllic and serene landscape, crossed by a winding and slow river; on the right bank stand some architectural ruins of classical structures, while in the foreground, seated in the center, serene and composed, a shepherdess spins wool while watching over her small flock of goats and cows. The painting is a hymn to nature, where the naturalistic elements, the earth, the sky, the river meet to form a harmonious and balanced scene, pervaded by pink light, in which the living figures and the architectural remains fit in with balance and calm. Schütz mainly painted river views of the Rhine and the Main, places he inhabited, and worked for important German clients, nobles and prelates. The painting has participated in several art auctions. Restored and relined, it is presented in a period frame.

A Cherry Seller Being Courted by Two Musicians ca. 1720

Oil on canvas. The painting is accompanied by an expertise by the art historian Dr. Giuseppe Sava. The protagonist of the open-air market scene is a cherry seller, wearing a showy straw hat and sitting next to a basket of these fruits placed on a wooden bench, next to a stone on which the steelyard rests. With a smiling, almost winking look, turned towards the viewer, she is accepting the advances of the man who, behind her, is placing a hand on her shoulder, with a lascivious look, while two musicians on the left improvise a small concert. The composite and cheerful group harks back to the production of Giacomo Francesco Cipper, known as Todeschini (1664 -1736), a painter of Austrian origins but Lombard in training and pictorial style, who was a "singer of peasants, street vendors intent on their daily occupations or pastimes", a specialist in market scenes, open-air concerts, card players, scenes of humble daily life created with laughing caricatural forcing and a search for comic effect. Cipper drew this narrative style from the Danish painter known as Monsù Bernardo, who was active for a long time in Italy between Bergamo and Milan: in particular, from him came the predilection for everyday stories and humble characters, as well as the impertinent nature of such characters, who seek the attention of the observer by staring at him. In this painting too, the female protagonist fixes her mischievous gaze on the observer, smiling with complicity and irony at the courtship game in which the three men make her the protagonist, implying a "market" that is no longer just that of cherries. In his expertise, Dr. Sava underlines the stylistic and typological relations of this painting with other characters by Cipper, in support of the attribution; the stylistic evolution in the formal and technical aspects of his works is also explained - the colors that lighten, with an evident predilection for ochre, hazelnut, sage green, among which powder blue creeps in; the milky backgrounds, the softer luminosity and the less plastic chiaroscuro -, an evolution that allows us to place the work in his production of the early 18th century. The painting has been restored and relined. It is presented in an adapted antique frame.