Landscape with a Fountain, Figures and Animals

In this highly idealised scene, various figures gather around a fountain. To the left, in the far distance, the walls and buildings of a fortified town are visible. Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-1788) creates a contrast between the urban and rural settings in order to highlight the pleasures of life in the country.  

Zuccarelli was considered one of the most important landscape painters to come out of mid-eighteenth-century Venice, Italy. While he spent most of his career in Venice, he visited England twice during the 1750s and 1760s and became a founding member of the Royal Academy in London. His warm, idyllic landscapes were enormously popular amongst English collectors.