Jacopo Bassano workshop; 17th century.

Workshop of JACOPO BASSANO the Younger (1549- 1592); early 17th century.
"Jacob and Rachel",
Oil on canvas. Relined antique.
Measurements: 97,5 x 139 cm (frame).
The work closely follows the model preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, of "Rachel and Jacob" painted by Jacopo Bassano the Younger, testimony of the wide diffusion and success of this composition, reproduced and adapted by the workshop and followers of the artist after his death.
The scene illustrates the biblical episode narrated in Genesis (29:1-14), in which Jacob meets Rachel at the well, a moment charged with symbolic and emotional significance, understood as the beginning of a story of love and providential alliance. The composition takes place in a vast pastoral landscape, a characteristic element of the Bassanesque school, where nature does not act as a mere background, but as a narrative space that frames and humanizes the sacred story.
From the stylistic point of view, the work presents distinctive features of the language developed by Jacopo Bassano and perpetuated by his workshop: a dynamic but balanced composition, the fluid integration of human and animal figures, and a marked interest in rural life and everyday details. The figures are arranged in a lively foreground, with eloquent gestures and natural attitudes, while the landscape opens up in depth through soft tonal gradations and warm lighting, with clear Venetian roots.
The iconography of Jacob and Rachel allows the painter to combine the biblical story with a pastoral scene, one of the most original contributions of the Bassano family. The encounter is presented not as a heroic event, but as an intimate, everyday episode, close to the viewer, in keeping with the devotional and narrative sensibility of late-Mannerist Venetian art.
Jacopo Bassano the Younger, son of Jacopo da Ponte, continued the activity of the prestigious family workshop after his father's death, contributing decisively to the spread of the Bassanesque style in the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. His production, both personal and workshop, was characterized by the reinterpretation of paternal models and by a remarkable ability to adapt successful compositions to different formats and demands. The influence of his work and his workshop was considerable, spreading throughout northern Italy and beyond, and leaving a lasting mark on biblical and pastoral painting, where the sacred and the everyday merge in a profoundly human vision of the religious story.