Landscape as an independent genre did not flower in Italy until the seventeenth century, though individual artists like Fra Bartolomeo had explored it much earlier. Pier Francesco Cittadini's fresh and atmospheric scene at the Crocker, once part of a famous French collection, combines several currents in mid-seventeenth-century Rome.

Cittadini, born in Milan probably in 1616, received his early training under the painter Daniele Crespi, then moved to Bologna at the age of seventeen to work under Guido Reni. At his maturity in the mid-1630s he received religious commissions, including an altarpiece for the church of Santo Stefano in Bologna depicting the stoning of the protomartyr. By the mid-1640s Cittadini was in Rome, where he encountered a very different scene: in addition to painters like Pierfrancesco Mola and Simone Cantarini, both of whom seem to have influenced his owrk, Cittadini surely knew the community of Dutch and Flemish artists in the city. Working in genres disdained by the Italians, for whom history painting was the highest expression of art, they had created their own market in scenes of daily life, still lifes, and especially landscapes depicting the country around Rome, which captivated them.(1) Cittadini spent the rest of his career working in the latter two genres and as a portraitist, supplying a ready market for such paintings in Northern Italy. He left Rome by 1650 for Sassuolo, where he supplied landscapes and garlands for the Este villa in the town, and returned to Bologna in 1653, where he married. He lived in Bologna and Milan for the rest of his life except for 1662–63, when he worked for the Este family in Modena. He died in Bologna in 1681.

The Crocker drawing depicts a herder in a deep and hilly landscape driving his animals—cattle, sheep, and goats—to market. Among Cittadini's surviving drawings are many graceful landscapes of this type, some of which include Biblical subjects, such as the Flight into Egypt now in the National Gallery of Canada.(2) The artist's treatment of the trees and landscape details in a similar manner to those in the series of the Prodigal Son in Windsor(3) makes clear the authorship of Cittadini rather than Zilotti, the name under which the drawing entered the collection. The windblown trees in the middle ground animate the drawing and contrast with the bold penmanship of the foreground tree and vegetation at lower left, devices used by Northern landscapists to anchor compositions while providing depth.

Except for its size, a drawing at Bowdoin College(4) could be seen as a pendant to the Crocker landscape. Along a path which seems to continue from the left, shepherds, cattleherds, and a donkey driver readjusting his animal's burden follow each other to market. Though paintings of such subjects are known in pairs, especially those by Northern artists, the two drawings may not be different preparations to a pair by Cittadini, since he is thought to have made some landscapes as independent works of art.(5)

Once thought to be the work of the eighteenth-century Veneto landscapist and printmaker Domenico Zilotti, the Crocker drawing was identified as Cittadini's by Noel Annesley, probably at the time of his visit in 1982.(6) The inscription and numbering at lower right are those of the eighteenth-century collector Pierre Crozat.(7)

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010