Landscape with Woodcutters and Horsemen

Marco Ricci worked most often at this size, small enough to hold in both hands, and this is one of those cabinet pictures, painted in tempera on a piece of goatskin rather than canvas. The skin took the quick, dry strokes he liked. The scene is a working landscape: woodcutters busy among the trees while riders pass along a track, the kind of everyday labour he set into wild country again and again. Pictures like this were made for collectors to keep indoors and study up close, and this one dates from the last decade of his life, around the 1720s.