Pair of river landscapes with figures

Exquisite. This is how we can define this pair of small paintings (oil on copper, 23.5 x 36 cm) attributable to the Roman painter Paolo Anesi (1697-1773). Painter and engraver is thus praised by Francesco Maria Gaburri in “Lives of the artists”  “In making beautiful landscapes he is not inferior in Rome to any painter of his time …. He combines the intelligence of painting with a sweetness of stroke, and such humility, that one cannot discuss with him, without being enchanted. ….. with elongated figures and the very liquid use of color.”  The sources remember Anesi as a good entrepreneur who knew how to manage himself well (he worked for important families such as the Colonna, the Doria Pamphili). A characteristic of the painter was the use of copper as a support, used and known for his activity as an engraver, which allowed him to give a particular luminosity to his small works, highly sought after for the Grand Tour market, which attracted young bourgeois and European aristocrats to the capital in search of art objects to take home upon returning from the trip.   Ranked among the major exponents in the field of landscape painting, these two pendants depict a “protagonist” fluvial landscape, not necessarily recognizable, a natural world interrupted only by sporadic figures and small inhabited centers on the hilltops. A perfect harmony between land, sky, water and vegetation to tell a moment of quiet suspended in time.  A particularity of these two paintings is the reuse of chalcographic copper matrices, historically used to make prints, i.e. to transfer the image onto paper once inked. The works were certified in 1978 by an important Genoese antique dealer (already a Turin collection) and on one of the backs is inserted the paper guarantee certificate which we deliberately did not remove; likewise, the photos do justice to the matrices that “without the recycling” of Anesi today, we would not have been able to appreciate their beauty. Dimensions: copper 24 x 36 cm - frame 34 x 45 cm approximately