Winter village landscape with travelers approaching a bridge

Francesco Foschi was born to a wealthy family in Ancona, his brothers Carlo, Giacomo, Orazio and Lorenzo all became painters. Francesco began his artistic training in the studio of Francesco Mancini and soon earned the patronage of Count Raimondo Bonaccorsi, who commissioned the young artist to paint 12 scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, now lost. In 1729 the Foschi family moved to Rome, where Foschi saw the view paintings of Giovanni Paolo Panini and Gaspare Vanvitelli. While in Rome, he turned to landscape painting. His first known winter landscape, which would soon become his specialty, is dated 1750 and is now in the Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble (inv. no. MG 428). In the mid-eighteenth century, his snow-capped capricci were in vogue and entered the collections of Prince Camillo Borghese, Pauline Bonaparte, Cardinal de Bernis, Ambassador of France in Rome, and Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador in Naples.