Carlo Antonio Tavella (1668 - 1738), Landscape With Laundresses

Carlo Antonio Tavella (Milan, 1668 - Genoa, 1738)

Landscape with laundresses

Oil on canvas, cm 75 x 100

With frame, cm 98 x 115

Considered by Carlo Giuseppe Ratti "one of the most excellent landscape painters we have had in our city', Carlo Antonio Tavella was a skilled landscape painter strongly inspired by the works of Dughet and Tempesta.

Born in Milan in January 1668 to the merchant Domenico Tavella and Teresa Ponsona, both of Genoese origin, Carlo Antonio was placed in 1678 by his father in the workshop of the painter Giuseppe Merati, and then passed from 1681 to 1688 in that of Giovanni Grevenbroech, the Solfarol. In 1691, after some travels in Emilia and Tuscany, Tavella settled for the first time in Genoa, where he married the sister of Giovanni Garzinotto, an unknown master specialized in the creation of still life paintings.

In the Ligurian city Tavella did not struggle to obtain significant commissions, as evidenced by the payments, dated to 31 December 1691 and 13 March 1692 respectively, related to the frescoes depicting Landscapes performed in the room dedicated to the Liberal Arts of Palazzo Brignole Sale (Palazzo Rosso). Following his subsequent return to Milan, the painter entered the circle of Pietro Mulier known as il Tempesta, with whom he would collaborate until the latter’s death in 1701. From that moment Carlo Antonio settled permanently in Genoa, absent in 1715 for a trip to Pavia and Milan and in 1727 for a stay in Lunigiana; from the Ligurian city he continued to send numerous paintings to the vast and propitious Lombard commission, of which we have news from the nineteen letters written by the painter, between 1702 and 1731, to the Bergamo merchant and collector Francesco Brontino.

Closely linked to the activity of the Roman landscape painters active in the late seventeenth century in Florence within the court of Ferdinando de' Medici, such as Crescenzio Onofri and Pandolfo Reschi, whose works were certainly studied by the artist during his stays in Tuscany, the pictorial production of Carlo Antonio Tavella is characterized by a uniform language, continuously repeated to satisfy a client who well liked his calm and harmonious compositions: in them the human presence, sacred, mythological or simply peasant, is introduced in wide classical landscapes that reveal a timely relationship with the Roman results of Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, perhaps known by the painter also directly during a hypothetical but probable trip to Rome. In the Eternal City the painter could have learned the best skills of this peculiar artistic genre, from the models of Annibale Carracci, to the tests of Gaspard Dughet (Rome, 1615-1675).

This analogy shows once again that the quality of his art can be equated with the best examples of Rome. The canvas in question elegantly documents the artist’s character, exquisitely Arcadian in nature.  Finally, it remains to remember the evident affinity of this scene with the Landscape with shepherds of the Diocesan Museum of Milan or the Landscape of the Museums of Strada Nuova in Genoa, or the Landscape with shepherd or herd of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Valletta

The object is in good condition

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