Lot Essay
Busiri Vici gives the execution of the figures to Pompeo Batoni. The sleeping shepherd is taken from the figure of Jacob in Raphael's 'Jacob's Ladder' in the Vatican Loggie and recurs in the picture illustrated by Busiri Vici as fig.202, while the mother and child recur in the view of the Ponte Milvio which he illustrates as fig.55.
Professor Marcel Roethlisberger, in the catalogue of the 1983 exhibition, relates the central part of the composition to Claude Lorrain's 'Mill' of 1648 (Liber Veritatis no.113, versions in the National Gallery, London, and Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome; M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, 1961, figs.196-7) and the picture as a whole to his 'Pastoral Landscape' at Castle Howard (ibid., fig.124)
Professor Marcel Roethlisberger, in the catalogue of the 1983 exhibition, relates the central part of the composition to Claude Lorrain's 'Mill' of 1648 (Liber Veritatis no.113, versions in the National Gallery, London, and Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome; M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, 1961, figs.196-7) and the picture as a whole to his 'Pastoral Landscape' at Castle Howard (ibid., fig.124)