Landscape with Peasants at a Fountain by Francesco Zuccarelli

Francesco Zuccarelli's "Landscape with Peasants at a Fountain" (1755, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a quiet Arcadian vision by the most celebrated Venetian landscape painter of the mid-eighteenth century, an artist whose name, within decades of his death, had nearly vanished from history.

Look at the woman standing at the fountain's edge. She is not a goddess or a nymph. She is a peasant, upright and still, drawing water or pausing to rest. Zuccarelli gave ordinary rural life the grace and harmony of classical myth. The fountain anchors everything, stone, water, the small cluster of figures at right, all held inside a soft, pearlescent sky that was his trademark.

Zuccarelli spent years in England, where his Arcadian landscapes were so fashionable that he became a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. He returned to Italy as president of the Venetian Academy. Then naturalism arrived, Constable, the Barbizon painters, and the Rococo idyll he perfected began to read as artifice. Turner confessed his figures could be beautiful, but the world had moved on.

A painter can be the most famous of his age and still be quietly set aside. This painting is one of the reasons he is being remembered again.