Two Cows, a Horse on a Rocky Cliff

Pietro Palmieri studied with Ercole Graziani (1688-1765) in Bologna, where he was born, but it was in Parma where he developed his particular, celebrated mode of rendering landscapes. A horse, two cows, and a figure are depicted among a craggy landscape in the present sheet. Some of Palmieri's drawings of rustic figures and animals are direct copies of passages taken from prints by Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683), showing Palmieri's perhaps unscrupulous enthusiasm for seventeenth-century Dutch art. It is possible that Palmieri encountered Dutch artists firsthand during the time when he taught at the Accademia di Parma, and he certainly would have met several when he moved to Paris for eight years in the 1770s. Several of Palmieri's landscapes were engraved and published in 1760 as Il Libro dei paessagi; however, Two Cows, and Horse on a Rocky Cliff was not included in this compendium.