Oil on canvas, 133x174 cm + frame 2 cm, Inv. n. 246

Within the vast production of this painter, this is one of the masterpieces that best summarises and highlights his spirit and exceptional stylistic vigour.
All of Boselli?s expressive world can be found in this painting, which is very-well known and has been exhibited on many occasions since the ?Exhibition on 17th and 18th-century Italian Painting? in Florence in 1922.
Around the mid-1930s, it became part of the Zauli-Naldi picture gallery from the Maggi Collection in Piacenza: in 1983 am expert restoration made it possible to recover, in addition to the dense and intense pictorial material, the figure of the elderly client, which had been covered.
We are in the presence of a ?summa? of this artist?s production, which resembles the ancient and contemporary tradition of Still Life painting in the Po Valley territory, reinterpreted with an omnivorous, yet acutely selective attention.
It would appear to be chronologically dated during the height of his career, perhaps around 1720.
This work confirms that Boselli represents the pure expression of one of the more secular aspects of "Po Valley" culture: a quasi-physical belonging to a quotidian reality studied in its less elegant and more palpable aspects of life.