Watermark: none.
Marco Ricci spent much of his life in Venice but was also active in Rome and Florence, as well as in England. Among the many artists who influenced his work was the seventeenth-century painter Salvator Rosa, whose romantic landscapes inhabited by brigands may have been a source for the treatment of the subject in this large, finished drawing. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"
Inscribed on verso of lining, in black chalk, "Ricci, Marco Venedig Belluno".
Saint-Saphorin, Armand-François-Louis de Mestral de, 1738-1805, former owner.
Marmier, Marco, former owner.
Scholz, János, former owner.
Scholz, Janos. Italian Master Drawings, 1350-1800, from the János Scholz Collection. New York : Dover, 1976, no. 131, repr.
Ryskamp, Charles, ed. Eighteenth Report to the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1975-1977. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978, p. 287.