The attribution has been kindly confirmed by Eunice Williams, who stressed in a letter dated 2 May 1996, that 'the clarity and precision of Fragonard's red chalk technique would indicate a date circa 1760, very close to that in another Italian view, A Group of Cypresses in a Park, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ananoff, op. cit., II, no. 904. The staffage figures in the two drawings are also similar'. Eunice Williams also compares the handling of this sheet to three further landscapes, all datable circa 1760: one of cypresses, formerly in John Nicholas Brown collection, now at the National Gallery in Washington, A Landscape with a Tower in the State Museum in Copenhagen (Rome, Villa Medici, J.H. Fragonard e Hubert Robert a Roma, 1990, no. 60, illustrated) and a last that shows the same Tuscan order for the architecture of the villa, in a private collection, E. Williams, Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections, National Gallery of Art, Washington and elsewhere, 1979, no. 14, illustrated.
The villa is, according to Eunice William, unidentified but 'the convincing sense of site suggests a real structure which Fragonard visited. He exploits one of his favourite compositional devices at this period, to draw the scene from a very low viewpoint which forces buildings and natural features to loom upward before the viewer's eyes. Fragonard designed in this manner not only large formal compositions such as the present work, but also the small black chalk sketches made along the itinerary from Rome to Paris in 1761, for example, View of Ronciglione, in the British Museum (Inv. 1936.5.9.1), Ananoff, op. cit., IV, no. 2126, fig. 568.
A counterproof of the present sheet is in the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island, where it is mounted in an album of works acquired by the American artist Charles Bird King on his Grand Tour early in the 19th Century.'
We are grateful to Eunice Williams for confirming the attribution and for her help in cataloguing the present drawing.