Pastoral Scene

Rustic figures gather in the warm half-light of an Italian countryside — a youth holding a basket of grapes, a girl with a pitcher, a shepherd boy with a dog — their life-size presence and soft chiaroscuro turning an everyday scene into a poetic reverie on rural life. Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, one of the leading Venetian painters of his generation, painted this and a companion picture about 1740 for Field Marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, whose taste for idealized pastorals this grand, softly glowing canvas was made to satisfy. The work descended from the marshal through English and Italian collections before the Art Institute of Chicago purchased it in 1937. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.