Three Eremits

This 1749 Three Hermits at the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu is a late work near the end of Magnasco's career, demonstrating that his signature subject of hermits in landscape persisted throughout his long working life to the very end. The Brukenthal museum in Transylvania — founded by the Habsburg governor Samuel von Brukenthal — collected Italian and Northern European paintings through the channels that distributed art across the Habsburg Empire, making it one of the most unexpected locations for a significant Magnasco. The three hermits in their typically austere landscape setting represent the mature, simplified statement of a visual theme Magnasco had explored for half a century.

The three hermit figures are rendered with the elongated proportions and flickering brushwork of Magnasco's late style, their forms barely distinguished from the wild landscape that surrounds them.