Two goats

The picture, painted in watercolour and gouache, depicts a billy goat leaning against a tree and picking off the leaves. Next to the tree is an ancient vase on a pedestal. The background is a landscape. The picture, with authorship ascribed to Vincenzo Brenna, was part of the collection of the Lubomirski family, who were the owners of the Łańcut castle in the 18th century. Vincenzo Brenna, an Italian painter and architect, spent time in Poland in the 1780s and worked at the Łańcut castle for Princess Lubomirska, painting polychromies in several rooms. Fascinated with antiquity, he created fantastic views of architecture and animals, as well as arabesque and grotesque motifs. The painting is displayed in the Brenna Suite on the ground floor of the castle, where the motif of the billy goats among ancient ruins appears repeatedly (the painter’s signature also appears there), while the bathroom is dominated by Pompeii-style painting - grotesque-arabesque motifs. According to castle inventories from 1802 and 1805, similar decorations were found in rooms on the second floor of the castle, as well as in the no longer existent orangery of the Na Dolnem manor farm. Presently, he is ascribed the authorship of works in the Chinese Suite (under a later wallpaper), the Pompeii Room on the second floor, and the polychromy in room 74 on the second floor (under a later wallpaper), discovered during a conservation in 2017. All of Brenna’s works are characterised by the same Pompeii style, which became fashionable in Europe in the 1780s, after the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, covered with lava after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.