Marco Ricci (1676- 1730) was a painter, printmaker and stage designer. A nephew of the painter Sebastiano Ricci, he probably began his career in Venice as his uncle's pupil and later spent four years in Split, Dalmatia, where he apprenticed to a landscape painter. His earliest dated works, View with Classical Ruins (1702; priv. col.), and a Landscape with Fishermen (1703; ex-Kupferstichkab., Berlin; untraced), are serene and classical. In 1708, Ricci left for England via the Netherlands, where he absorbed characteristics of Dutch landscapes. His works consist of a variety of pastoral scenes, Mediterranean ports, thickly wooded countryside with travellers, and winter scenes. He also made larger ruin pieces and capriccios that blend the realistic with the fantastical. Both Ricci's etched and painted landscapes were seminal to the development of the genre in 18th-century Venice and his art influenced painters such as Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and the etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
This work closely resembles Ricci's landscapes of the 1720s in both composition and execution and his diminuative peasant figures particularly recall those which populate Ricci's pastoral landscapes. The warm colouring, meandering path, distant blue mountains and river in the foreground are all characteristic of Ricci's work in the first decades of the 18th century, visible for example in his Landscape with River and Figures ca. 1720 now in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice. While the quality of 1447-1882 is very high, it lacks the delicacy and attention to detail that Ricci lavished on his landscapes suggesting that it was painted by an artist working close to the Master.