A Pair of Landscapes
Signature
A Landscape with Hunters and Their Dogs at a Cascading Stream signed, on the lower right: ‘P’; inscribed, verso: ‘R’
A River Landscape with Horses, a Rider, A Ferry, and Fishermen signed, on the tree to the right: ‘P’; inscribed, verso: ‘R’
Provenance
(Probably) acquired directly from the artist by a Tuscan noble family;
thence by descent until 2024
Born in Danzig in 1640, Pandolf Resch, whose name was Italianised to Pandolfo Reschi, was sent as a youth to Germany by his father, a wealthy Polish merchant who wished to educate his son in his trade. Soon after his father’s death, however, Reschi decided to go to Italy, settling in Rome around 1660 with the aim of becoming a painter. No works are known from Reschi’s Roman period, but he clearly studied the paintings of Salavtor Rosa, Jacques Courtois, called il Borgognone, Gaspard Dughet, and the Bamboccianti, examples of which he must have encountered on the city’s bustling art market. In the late 1660s Reschi relocated to Florence, where he would remain until his death. After working in the studios of Livio Mehus, Pietro Dandini, and Antonio Giusti, around 1670 Reschi attracted the notice of the Marchese Pier Antonio Gerini, who employed the painter for nine years. Initially Reschi executed copies of battle scenes after Jacques Courtois for Gerini but subsequently produced around twenty original battle and landscape paintings for the nobleman. During the subsequent decade, Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici, Grand Duke Cosimo III’s younger brother, became Reschi’s principal benefactor. Reschi painted numerous landscapes, topographical views, and animal paintings for the cardinal’s residences, while at the same time fulfilling commissions for battle scenes and landscapes from Florence’s most distinguished noble families, including the Corsini, Rinuccini, and Riccardi, who doubtless responded vigorously to the tastes set by the Medici.
The present pair of landscapes have remained with the descendants of the family for which Reschi painted them. In one canvas, pigeon hunters and their hounds perch on rocks to either side of a winding ravine whose strong current is implied by the water gushing over a rocky outcrop in the work’s middle ground. They engage in variety of activities; one hunter takes aim at a bird indicated to him by a companion, a dog delivers a dead bird to his masters, and another hunter readies his shotgun. In the other canvas, a rider pauses as his horses are loaded onto a boat, waiting to cross a wider, calmer river which various boatmen are shown traversing, or delivering passengers safely to the opposite side. Both of these landscapes are signed by Reschi with the initial ‘P’, in the lower right of the hunting scene and on the trunk of a tree at right in the river scene. Reschi was often referred to as ‘Monsù Pandolfo’ in documents of the period, and this initial can be found on other paintings by the artist.[1]
The paintings are close in style to two large pendant paintings—a Return from the Hunt now in the Uffizi in Florence and a Landscape now in the Palazzo di Montecitorio in Rome—commissioned from Reschi by Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici between 1690 and 1695 for the Palazzo Pitti.[2] These larger works share with the present paintings the same spacious approach to landscape as well as their vertical formats distinctive of Reschi’s later works. Likewise comparable stylistically to the Landscape with Hunters is the Landscape with a Waterfall, datable to 1690, now in the Galleria Corsini in Rome.[3]
Together, the pendants combine a hunting scene with a placidly bucolic one, taking a highly naturalistic, impeccably approach to the details of each subject reminiscent of Northern artistic technique. Remarkable in both canvases is Reschi’s highly fluid handling of paint, suggesting the rapid and assured execution of the works and the artist’s confidence by this stage of his career. While Reschi’s sometimes wild landscapes are reminiscent of Salvator Rosa, his paintings favor the idyllic over the mysterious or even threatening in serene, sunny compositions executed with a great deal of naturalistic attention to detail but also a highly refined, fluidly rendered polish.