Seascape With Sailing Ships, attributed to Marco Ricci (1676 - 1730)

Marco Ricci (Belluno, 1676 – Venice, 1730) attributed

Seascape with Sailing Ships

oil on canvas 55 x 84 cm - with frame 71 x 100 cm

This evocative coastal view, dating from between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, where the choppy waves of the sea crash impetuously against the coast, can be attributed to the painter Marco Ricci (Belluno, 1676 – Venice, 1730), one of the founders of 18th century Venetian landscape painting.

In his personal expressive style, especially in the initial phase of his painting, the tendencies of landscape painting present in Italy at the end of the 17th century converge, and in particular his debt to foreign landscape painters working in Venice at the end of the 17th century, such as Johan Anton Eismann, Luca Carlevarijs or Pieter Mulier, known as Il Cavalier Tempesta.

Several scholars have hypothesised that Marco Ricci may have travelled to Rome at the turn of the century, where he had the opportunity to see first-hand the paintings of Salvator Rosa, one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, whose works were also present in the homes of the Venetian patriciate of the time. Finally, in this maze of stylistic references we cannot fail to mention the Genoese Alessandro Magnasco, from whom we see an increasingly rapid and loose brushstroke, which he acquired during his stay in Milan in the last decade of the 17th century.

The linguistic references just mentioned can be found in many paintings that can be traced back to an early phase of our painter's career (therefore presumably still in the 17th century), to which it would be advisable to also place our canvas: In fact, there are still strong links with 17th-century landscape painting, particularly in the use of strong, dark, almost iron-like tones, and very accentuated chiaroscuro contrasts, with dark-coloured clouds cluttering up the sky. The influence of Magnasco's painting (to whose hand our canvas was previously linked) is evident, especially in the small figures of fishermen in the foreground extracting a fishing net from the water, and we can compare the characters with the Stormy Sea with Shipwrecked Sailors, North Carolina Museum (https://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/scheda/opera/68587/), where the powerful brushstrokes almost make us perceive the roar of the waves crashing against the reef.

Therefore, based on the stylistic characteristics, we cannot exclude the collaboration of the Genoese painter in some details.