A wooded landscape with shepherds and their flock by a stream; and A rocky wooded landscape with travellers resting by a waterfall

Feodor Matveev (pronounced ‘Matveyev’) was the most important landscape painter of the Russian School in his generation, ushering in a tradition that would come to include such celebrated landscapists as Aivazovsky, Levitan, Repin (both members of the Itinerants) and Pokhitonov, over the course of the next century. Like his important contemporaries specialising in another genre – the portraitists Levitsky and Borovikovsky – Matveev embodied the moment when Russian artists of the ‘Golden Age’ mastered painting in a Western European tradition. Alongside Western counterparts such as the Frenchmen Claude-Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert, and the German Jakob Philipp Hackert, Matveev cast Italian scenery in a classicising mode, ultimately inspired by the example of Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century.

A star pupil in Saint Petersburg during the reign of Catherine the Great, he moved to Italy in 1779, where he met Hackert, who became a mentor. He would remain in Italy for the rest of his life, signing his works with Latin characters (as here), and painting views near Rome and Tivoli, but also occasionally as far afield as Switzerland and Sicily. He joined the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1813. Most of his oeuvre is preserved in the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. His works appear on the market extremely rarely, although recently two significant landscapes have re-emerged: a view of the Campo Vaccino (Delvaux, Paris, 6 April 2012, lot 97, €270,000) and one set in the Roman Campagna (John Moran, Altadena, 29 April 2014, lot 1049, $420,000).