Description
Felice Boselli (Piacenza 1650 – Parma 1732) – Shepherd with Flock and Fowl.
Oil on canvas, in a wood frame lacquered in faux marble.
Felice Boselli is among the leading Emilian exponents of still life and animal painting between the 17th and 18th centuries. Active mainly in Parma, where he worked for the Farnese court and for important noble patrons, he developed a dense, naturalistic pictorial language rooted in the Lombard and Emilian tradition of the genre.
The artist’s mature output is characterized by crowded compositions combining farmyard animals, game and rustic figures, rendered with a rich, textured brushwork and a warm, earthy palette. The rooster perched on the fence, painted with close attention to its plumage, and the group of sheep and goats gathered around the young shepherd are typical elements of Boselli’s animal repertoire from the early eighteenth century. The composition, arranged across two registers with poultry above and the grazing flock below, near the figure of the shepherd, finds close stylistic parallels in autograph works such as “Selvaggina con bambini che giocano con un cane” (Parma, Galleria Nazionale) and the pair “Vecchio e ragazza con cacciagione” (Collezione Marchese Meli Lupi di Soragna Tarasconi), both datable to 1708-1710, a period to which the present painting can also be assigned.
Condition report: Lined canvas. Good state of preservation of the pictorial surface, with signs of age and wear.
