| Description |
Travi was best known for his landscapes, and often included animals and peasants within them. This work is a perfect example of Travi's subject matter, as it conforms to his style of composition.Travi's career is very hard to trace, due to a lack of dated works, but his landscapes, for which he is best known, owe much to both Italian and northern European influences.The consistency of Travi's landscape style and the lack of dated pictures make it impossible to develop a chronology for his work. |
| Notes |
In 1948 Cecil Gould wrote to the gallery, venturing Neil MacLaren's opinion that the painting would best be attributed to the 'neighbourhood of Antonio Travi' although probably not by the artist himself. Gould added that 'it's the sort of picture that is likely to remain anonymous'. The then director of Wakefield City Art Gallery, Eric Westbrook, had already noted 'a Flemish tendency', which MacLaren's proposal of Travi would support. It is certainly true to say that genre scenes of this type were very rare in Spanish painting during the seventeenth century, though that fact alone cannot entirely disprove the painting's previous attribution. The proximity of the Wakefield painting to autograph works by Travi is, stylistically, far from conclusive. His propensity for broad peasant types, such as the shepherds depicted, as well as the Flemish influenced landscape do, however, support an attribution to Travi's 'neighbourhood', which remains the most probable credible proposal to date. |
