Landscape with a Farmhouse in the Foreground

Dimensions with Frame: 10 ¾” h x 13” w (27 ½ cm x 33 cm.)

Giuseppe Zais may have been a painters apprentice in Belluno before moving to Venice circa 1725-30. Zais’ most significant influence was from Marco Ricci, another Belluno native, who was in Venice from 1717 until his death in 1729. Ricci’s etchings, published in 1730, were a source from which Zais derived the form of his landscapes, often framed by trees with villages and peasant figures. Zais’ works had a great descriptive style which was very pleasing and his contact with Fracesco Zuccarelli in the early 1730’s, caused another phase in his work which demonstrated his refinement and less of Ricci’s drama. Zais received many commissions from the English consul in Venice, Joseph Smith. He was able to adapt his work to suit his patrons, with styles that varied from the Flemish to paintings of battle scenes by Francesco Simonini.
In 1768 Zais was a member of the Fraglia dei Pittori Veneziani, and was accepted in the Accademia di Venezia in 1774 as a landscape painter, a gênre he continued to practice in Venice for fifty years. Zais’ only dated painting is a Landscape with Fountain (1765 Venice, Accademia). He illustrated the 1772 edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and painted frescoes at Villa Pisani at Strá.
His drawings are methodical, concise and skillful, as in this view of a large rustic building with a pergola, with a ruin on the hill behind it, a bridge with trees, an aqueduct below a castellated hill town, which is seen on the hill in the background.
The drawing has the collectors mark in Fritz Lught’s supplement #894 on recto.