Pine trees in a hill landscape with figures seated in the foreground

After fleeing Venice when accused of murdering a gondolier, Marco Ricci led a peripatetic life traveling in Italy, Northern Europe and England. He collaborated with his uncle, Sebastiano Ricci, on a variety of projects, but he is most famous for his landscapes. Ricci’s landscape drawings belong to a tradition originating in Venice during the Renaissance in the works of painters such as Giorgione and Titian.

This sheet belongs to a group of similar compositions executed in pen and ink in a meticulous style and depicting imaginary mountainous landscapes. Several similar sheets are in the Royal Collection at Windsor (see A. Blunt and E. Croft-Murray, Venetian Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1957, pp. 30-40) and one at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (inv. I, 77b).