A pastoral scene with two shepherds tending their flock and a peasant couple leading a donkey

This drawing belongs to a group of illustrations of the lives of peasants and gypsies on the Venetian mainland, all of roughly the same dimensions, fully worked up and set within neat framing lines, which James Byam Shaw dates to the last decade of the 18th Century and the first years of the 19th Century (J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, pp. 46-48). Mr Byam Shaw suggests that these drawings may reflect Domenico's essentially conservative nature, and that he was trying to focus on a charming buccolic idyll in contrast to the disturbing and indeed revolutionary ideas of the age.