Landscape with a Hermit

When the paintings of Louis XIV were inventoried in 1683, this little landscape was entered under the name of Annibale Carracci. The king had bought it in 1671. The Louvre now catalogues it as Domenichino's, and dates it no more closely than the first half of the 17th century.

The original painted surface is tiny, roughly 26 by 35 centimetres, and strips were added early on along three of its sides to make it larger. A hermit sits outside his hut at the foot of a great tree, while on the left a waterfall drops down below a hill town. A close version of the same picture hangs in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome, and the Louvre gives that one, probably, to Pietro Paolo Bonzi, a painter of landscapes and still lifes who worked in Rome in the same circle.