A shepherd resting with sheep, goats and dogs before a hillside town

The artist was a member of a prominent family of artists: his father, Johann Heinrich Roos, was one of the foremost German landscape and animal painters of his day. At the age of twenty, Phillipp travelled to Italy on a bursary from the Landgrave of Hesse; there, he settled in Rome and studied under Giacinto Brandi, whose son-in-law he became in 1681. His pictures are exclusively of animals and herdsmen, usually placed boldly in the foreground, in mountainous settings, comparable to the present work. He aquired the nickname Mercurius from the deftness of his work, and the sobriquet 'da Tivoli', from his purchase of a house in there in 1691.