Giuseppe Maria Crespi | Peasants with Donkeys | NG6627

Key facts

Full title	Peasants with Donkeys
Artist	Giuseppe Maria Crespi
Artist dates	1665 - 1747
Series	Two Peasant Scenes
Date made	about 1710-15
Medium and support	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	94.1 × 53.8 cm
Acquisition credit	Presented by the Trustees of Sir Denis Mahon's Charitable Trust through the Art Fund, 2013
Inventory number	NG6627
Location	Not on display
Collection	Main Collection

Peasants with Donkeys

Giuseppe Maria Crespi

Crespi is best known today for his paintings of everyday life. This scene, in which a man lifts a heavy basket of bread rolls from the side of his donkey, draws on the Bolognese tradition of depicting street vendors at their work. A bearded figure on the right raises his hand to purchase three of them, while the woman next to him looks intently towards the seller in an attempt to get his attention. A man carrying a sack on his shoulders strides past, glancing at the central figure as if he’s reacting to something the man is saying.

The nocturnal setting allows for a dramatic contrast between light and dark areas, with particular details highlighted, such as the vendor’s muscular forearm and white sleeve. The three figures to the lower right emerge out of the gloom, the light revealing their individual facial features and expressions.

Crespi is best known today for his paintings of everyday life. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most Italian artists paid little attention to the themes of daily life and labour, concentrating on grander imagery drawn from religion, mythology and history. But some, like Crespi, were influenced by Dutch genre painters working in Italy, who had a strong tradition of depicting everyday activities.

This scene draws on the Bolognese tradition of depicting street vendors at their work. Here, a man lifts a heavy basket of bread rolls from the side of his donkey. A bearded figure on the right, who holds the reins of another donkey, raises his hand to purchase three of them, while the woman next to him looks intently towards the seller in an attempt to get his attention. Another figure waits in line. A man carrying a sack on his shoulders strides past the vendor, glancing at the central figure as if he’s reacting to something the man is saying. We know that this canvas has been cut down on the top and left sides, so it is possible that Crespi may have originally intended this figure to be walking towards something or someone in the original composition.

Crespi often positioned his figures in unusual and imaginative ways. The bread seller here is depicted in a twisted pose, his head completely turned away from us and directed towards his customers. The nocturnal setting allows for a dramatic contrast between light and dark areas, with particular details highlighted, such as the vendor’s muscular forearm and white sleeve, and the intricately woven basket strapped to the donkey. The three figures to the right emerge out of the gloom, the light revealing their individual facial features and expressions but also perhaps making them look a little sinister.

As in this painting’s pendant, Musicians, Crespi has used broad, sweeping brushstrokes and loose, lively brushwork to give the scene a sense of dynamism. The earthy colour palette and bright light emphasise the tactile quality of details such as the exposed skin and simple clothing of the two main figures, as well as the coarse, silvery-grey hair of the donkey in the foreground.

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Peasants with Donkeys by Giuseppe Maria Crespi

Two Peasant Scenes

Peasants with Donkeys and its companion painting Musicians are intimate scenes of peasant life, observed by night as if we ourselves are part of the action. Both make use of a warm, earthy palette and lively, loose brushwork to bring the figures they depict to life. The two pictures probably date from between 1710 and 1715, shortly after Crespi’s stay in Florence.

These pictures were formerly thought to be fragments of a single composition, perhaps an Old Testament subject. Close examination of the canvases, however, has shown that they were part of two separate, though related, works. Both have at some point been cut down at the left and top edges, and it is impossible to know how large they originally were. They are slightly different sizes but the similarities in the scale of the figures, the range of colour and the lively brushstrokes suggest that they must have been intended to hang together.

Peasants with Donkeys and its companion painting Musicians are intimate scenes of peasant life, observed by night as if we ourselves are part of the action. They probably date from between 1710 and 1715, shortly after Crespi’s stay in Florence.

These two pictures were formerly thought to be fragments of a single composition, perhaps an Old Testament subject. Close examination of the canvases, however, has shown that they were part of two separate, though related, works. Both have at some point been cut down at the left and top edges, and it is impossible to know how large they originally were. They are slightly different sizes but the similarities in the scale of the figures, the range of colour and the lively brushstrokes suggest that they must have been intended as pendants.

Although Crespi spent most of his career in Bologna, he played a significant role in shaping a taste for painting scenes of everyday life among his Italian contemporaries. Unlike the Netherlands, which had a thriving market for genre scenes, such paintings were relatively few and far between in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy. Crespi’s pupils Giambattista Piazzetta and Pietro Longhi played a significant role in developing the taste for this kind of genre scene, as did patrons like the Grand Prince Ferdinand de' Medici and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, for whom Crespi worked while in Florence.

Several figures in these two works were copied by the minor Bolognese painter Giuseppe Gambarini, who is not known as a pupil of Crespi but must have visited his studio in the 1710s. Gambarini’s Dance in the Country includes two musicians that are closely related to Crespi’s; its pendant, Friars Receiving Alms (both Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) reverses the motif of the donkey and tradesman in Peasants with Donkeys, transforming the figure into a friar. Gambarini must have copied these aspects after Crespi’s pictures had been cropped: in the work of both artists only the forequarters of the donkey are visible.

Crespi’s two paintings were part of a group of 25 Italian Baroque pictures that entered the National Gallery’s collection in 2013. They previously belonged to Sir Denis Mahon, a distinguished collector, art historian and former trustee of the Gallery.

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Peasants with Donkeys

Two Peasant Scenes

More paintings by Giuseppe Maria Crespi