Two Peasant Women with Farm Animals

Animal subjects of Flemish character were an important genre of 17th-century Genoese painting, and a specialty of the school’s greatest artist, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. The Museum possesses a fine painting of the kind by his son and follower, as well as nine drawings and some three dozen etchings by Giovanni Benedetto himself. Training in Antwerp, then active in Rome, Roos settled in Genoa in 1616. A great success, his work helped established the genre of animal painting and inspired Castiglione’s specific approach, weaving familiar, domesticated animals into a procession across the foreground of a deep landscape. Only recently identified, Roos’s drawings are striking in their complex atmosphere and broad touch. They evidently also influenced the formation of Castiglione’s draftsmanship. They are, however, quite rare: there is only one other in an American public collection, and the Suida-Manning Collection had none.