Lot 1128 Dα

Little is known with regard to the biography of the veduta and genre painter Pietro Fabri. He is assumed to be of English descent as he signed some of his works “l'Inglese” and because the British ambassador to Naples William Hamilton described him as “a native from Great Britain”. Hamilton was one of Fabri's most important patrons, and the artist is known to have accompanied him on a sojourn to Sicily. However, Fabri is only documented as working in Naples, and the dates of his birth and death appear not to be recorded at all.
Fabri's œuvre consists primarily of views of Naples and depictions of the surrounding countryside and its inhabitants. Alongside Hamilton, his patrons are thought to have included the court of Naples, as several of his works depict events from the life of King Charles VII (the later King Charles III of Spain) and Ferdinand IV. Fabri's works were also highly sought-after by English travellers to Italy, who were to be found in great numbers in Naples around the second half of the 18th century. Fabri's international repute was presumably also greatly helped by the series of engravings after his vedutas made by P. Sandby and A. Robertson between 1777 and 1782 entitled “Views in and near Naples”. His more seldom religious works include two signed depictions of Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua kept in the Church of Santa Chiara in Bari.
The present work is a characteristic and striking example of his genre pieces. It depicts two large groups of figures before a brightly lit landscape panorama. The work displays an entirely different relationship between figures and landscape as, for example, the works of his contemporary Jacob Philipp Hackert. Whereas Hackert's large works utilise a traditional landscape composition with relatively small figural staffage, in Fabri's pieces the characters - lifted directly from Neapolitan society - become the protagonists whilst the landscape assumes the function of a stage, but without relinquishing any of its Mediterranean beauty and charm. Whilst the figures in the left half of the image are clearly recognisable as bandits surveying their loot, the group of three in the right foreground is shown resting in the shadow of a tree enjoying a meal and a pipe.
We would like to thank Prof. Nicola Spinosa in Naples for confirming the authenticity of this work. He dates the piece to around 1780 (“è sicuramente opera di Pietro Fabris intorno al 1780”).