Francesco Zuccarelli’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Francesco Zuccarelli (formerly also Zuccherelli, Italian pronunciation: [franˈtʃesko dzukkaˈrɛlli], 15 August 1702 – 30 December 1788) RA, was an Italian painter of the late Baroque or Rococo period. He is considered to be the most important landscape painter to have emerged from his adopted city of Venice during the mid-eighteenth century, and his Arcadian views became popular throughout Europe and especially in England where he resided for two extended periods. In 1768, Zuccarelli became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and upon his final return to Italy, he was elected president of the Venetian Academy.

Rome and Tuscany (1702–32)

Born at Pitigliano, in southern Tuscany, Zuccarelli began his apprenticeship in Rome c. 1713–14 with the portrait painters Giovanni Maria Morandi (1622–1717) and his pupil Pietro Nelli (1672–1740), under whose tutelage he learned the elements of design while absorbing the lessons of Roman classicism. Francesco completed his first commission in his hometown of Pitigliano in the years 1725–27, a pair of chapel altarpieces. With the sponsorship of the Florentine art connoisseur, Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (1676–1742), in the late 1720s and early 1730s Zuccarelli focused on etching. He eventually produced at least 43 prints, the majority consisting of two series which recorded the deteriorating frescoes of Giovanni da San Giovanni (1592–1636) and Andrea del Sarto (1486–1531). During his period in Florence, though preoccupied with figurative subjects, he began to experiment with drawings in landscape, and according to a non-contemporary source, his introduction to the latter genre was through the Roman landscape painter and etcher Paolo Anesi (1697–1773).

Venice and two stays in England (1732–71)

In 1732, after a stay of several months in Bologna, Zuccarelli relocated to Venice. Prior to his arrival in the Republic, the death of Marco Ricci in 1730 had created an opening in the field of landscape painting amid a marketplace crowded with history painters. While continuing to paint religious and mythological works, he increasingly devoted his output to landscapes, drawing inspiration from the classicism of Claude and the Roman school. His early paintings from the 1730s also show briefly the influence of Alessandro Magnasco, and for a longer period, of Ricci. Zuccarelli brought a more mellow and airy palette to the typically Venetian colors, and using tonal values of higher luminous content than Ricci, the figures in his rural landscapes came alive. The Tuscan scored an immediate success in Venice. Zuccarelli enjoyed early patronage, from amongst others, Marshal Schulenburg; Consul Smith, who became his longtime patron; and Francesco Algarotti; who recommended him to the Elector of Saxony, Augustus III of Poland. He often worked with other artists, including Bernardo Bellotto and Antonio Visentini. In the mid–1740s, under the auspices of Consul Smith, he produced with Visentini a series featuring neo-Palladian architecture, as can be seen in Burlington House (1746). Most charming of the Zuccarelli and Visentini collaborations is a set of 52 playing cards with Old Testament subjects published in Venice in 1748. The hand-colored scenes are treated in a light manner, the suit symbols are ingenious, and the cards begin with the creation of Adam and end with a battle scene that has an elephant carrying a castle. The outstanding achievement of his first Venetian period was a series of seven canvases, now located at Windsor Castle, which according to a note in an 18th century manuscript catalogue, represent the biblical characters of Rebecca with Jacob and Esau. The tall paintings are couched in a tender and dream-like poetic vein, and most likely were originally situated at Consul Smith’s villa at Mogliano. He also occasionally created pastisches of various 17th-century Dutch masters. Towards 1750, when Zuccarelli reached his peak, his paint handling was very responsive to mood, bright with regard to color, thinly laid on and yet vibrantly effecti1ve.

Francesco travelled to England to 1752, where his decorative talent resulted in diverse work, including the design of tapestries with the weaver Paul Saunders at Holkham Hall. Around 1760 he drew from Shakespeare, depicting a scene from Macbeth where Macbeth and Banquo encounter the three witches, noteworthy as being one of the first paintings to portray theatrical characters in a landscape. Zuccarelli held a sale of his canvases in 1762 at Prestage and Hobbs in London, before his departure for Italy. In the same year, King George III acquired thirty of his works through the purchase of much of Consul Smith’s extensive art collection and library in Venice. In 1763 he became a member of the Venetian Academy, but Zuccarelli was soon induced to journey back to London in 1765 by his friend Algarotti’s bequest of a cameo and group of drawings made to Lord Chatham. On this second visit to England, he was lauded by the English nobility and critics alike, and invited to exhibit at leading art societies; moreover, King George III is said to have commissioned the out-sized painting River Landscape with the Finding of Moses (1768). Francesco Zuccarelli was a founding member, in 1768, of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Final years in Italy (1771–88)

Upon his return to Italy in 1771, Zuccarelli was soon afterward elected President of the Venetian Academy. The work of his late maturity can broadly be characterized as “neo-riccian”, for in this period the artist’s style recalled the precision of his youthful emulation of Marco Ricci. Francesco Zuccarelli eventually settled in Florence, and he died there in 1788.

Reputation and legacy

Francesco Zuccarelli was one of the few Venetian painters of his era to win universal acclaim, even from critics who rejected the concept of Arcadia. He was especially popular among the followers of Rousseau. Francesco Maria Tassi (1716–1782), in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of Bergamo remarks that Zuccarelli paints “landscapes with the most charming figures and thus excels not only artists of modern times but rivals the great geniuses of the past; for no one previously knew how to combine the delights of an harmonious ground with figures gracefully posed and represented in the most natural colours”. With the move to more representational modes of depicting landscape in the 19th century, a reaction set in, and his works were to be the subject of the most disparaging invective. A reappraisal of the artist began in 1959 with a decisive article by Michael Levey, Francesco Zuccarelli in England, which helped explain the appeal of his works to his contemporaries by drawing a parallel with the affection of the 18th century English for pastoral poetry, since everyone could recognize a pleasing convention when they saw one; in this case, a fairyland where “the skies are forever blue, the trees forever green.” The exaltation of the rural life as a retreat from the noise of urbanity had the sanction of a long and distinguished history; as Levey writes, “Virgil had recommended it, Petrarch had practised it; Zuccarelli was left to illustrate it. The last few decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Zuccarelli by Italian scholars, notably by Federico Dal Forno, who published an artistic biography with sixty paintings in 1994, and Federica Spadotto, who issued a catalogue raisonné in 2007. In a larger cultural context, modern historians have considered Zuccarelli to be a figure of interest with his love of escapism, seen as not untypical of the late Baroque.

During the mid to late 18th century Francesco Zuccarelli was widely imitated, and artists influenced by him included Richard Wilson, Giuseppe Zais, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, and Vittorio Amedeo Cignaroli. Among those who created engravings after his work were Joseph Wagner, Fabio Berardi, Giovanni Volpato, Francesco Bartolozzi, and William Woollett.

Identification of works

His paintings are rarely signed, yet they often contain a gourd water bottle that was held at the waist by rural Italian women, a punning allusion to his surname, zucco being the Italian word for gourd. A defining touch found consistently across the long span of Francesco’s career is a serene and vaguely sweet expression on the faces of his rounded figures.

Selected paintings

• Saint Michael and the Devil; and The Holy Souls in Purgatory (1725–27) – Oil on canvas, 292 x 197 cm, Museo Civico, Pitigliano
• Landscape with a Castle; and Landscape with a Bridge (c. 1735) – Oil on canvas, 56 x 73 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
• Landscape with River and Shepherds at Rest; and Landscape with Bridge and Knight (c. 1736) – Oil on canvas, 41 x 62 cm, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
• Landscape with Peasants at a Fountain (c. 1740) – Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 120.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Landscape with a Sleeping Child and a Woman Milking a Cow (early 1740s) – Oil on panel, 61 x 91.4 cm, Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh
• Landscape with a Wayside Tavern (early 1740s) – Oil on canvas, 82.6 x 113 cm, Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey
• Landscape with a Woman fording a Stream on Horseback (c. 1742–43) – Oil on canvas, 36.8 x 50.2 cm, Windsor Castle, Windsor
• Roman Capriccio with Triumphal Arch, the Pyramid of Cestius, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Castle of the Holy Angel (with Bernardo Bellotto, 1742–47) – Oil on canvas, 117 x 132 cm, Galleria nazionale, Parma
• Wooded Landscape with the Meeting of Isaac and Rebecca (1743) – Oil on canvas, 230 x 448 cm, Windsor Castle, Windsor
• Landscape with Jacob Watering Laban’s Flock (1743) – Oil on canvas, 230.5 x 138.4 cm, Windsor Castle, Windsor
• Landscape with a Waterfall and Two Women with a Boy Fishing (1740–45) – Oil on canvas, 133.3 x 79.1 cm, Buckingham Palace, City of Westminster
• Bacchanal (c. 1745) – Oil on canvas, 142 x 210 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
• The Banqueting Hall, Whitehall (with Antonio Visentini, 1746) – Oil on canvas, 84.1 x 128.9 cm, Windsor Castle, Windsor
• Silenus with Nymphs (1747) – Oil on canvas, 107 x 142 cm, Sanssouci, Potsdam
• Saint Jerome Emiliani with Orphans and the Virgin in Glory with Child (1748) – Oil on canvas, 270 x 181.5 cm, Pinacoteca Repossi, Chiari
• Portrait of Ercole Comini at Two Years (1751) – Oil on canvas, 51 x 41 cm, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
• Pastoral Scene (early 1750s) – Oil on canvas, 60 x 88 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
• Eastern Couple with Dromedary (c. 1756–58) – Oil on canvas, 180 x 130 cm, Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza
• Refreshment during the Ride (c. 1760) – Oil on canvas, 72 x 105 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
• Et in Arcadio Ego (1760) – Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 90.17 cm, collection Sir James Fergusson, London
• River Landscape with the Finding of Moses (1768) – Oil on canvas, 227.3 x 386 cm, Windsor Castle, Windsor
• Saint John the Baptist Preaching on the River Jordan (late 1760s) – Oil on canvas, 56 x 97 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
• Bull Hunting (early 1770s) – Oil on canvas, 114 x 150 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
• Banquet at a Villa (1770–1775) – Oil on canvas, 80 x 163 cm, Fondo Ambiente Italiano, Milan

• Pyne 1819, p. 115; Levey 1964, p. 106.