A winter landscape with a mill by a frozen river

Marco Ricci started his career in his native Belluno, probably in the studio of his uncle Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734). After murdering a gondolier in a brawl, the artist was exiled, fled to Split and later moved to Milan and Venice and travelled to London in 1708 accompanying Charles Edward Montagu, 1st Duke of Manchester (c.1662-1722), previously 4th Earl of Manchester. On the journey to London, Ricci stayed in the Netherlands where he studied Dutch landscape painting. As a result of these travels, Ricci's drawings and paintings often display the influences of both the Italian and Dutch schools.

About half of Ricci's output consists of gouaches of similar size to the present one, often made on kidskin, datable around the 1720s. Most of these show Arcadian landscapes while only a small corpus of winter landscapes are known. In her monograph on the artist, Annalisa Scarpa Sonino only included two such winter landscapes: one in the Royal Collection, also with a tower (inv. RCIN 400582) and another in a private collection, London (A. Scarpa Sonino, Marco Ricci, Milan, 1991, nos. T 14 and T 113, figs. 212 and 213).