The animal pieces are a separate group of works in the oeuvre of Jacob Philipp Hackert, which he developed as an independent genre alongside the large landscape paintings. While the animals, including goats and sheep, dogs, and occasionally cattle or rabbits served him as staffage that enlivens the vastness of the Italian landscape, they receive greater attention in the small, portrait-like formats. Hackert combines perspective techniques of the veduta by playing with the contrast between the near foreground and the distance, with an apparently realistic attention to detail that differs from idealistic landscape painting. He depicts the soft fur of the goats in all nuances with virtuoso fine painting. For such works, Hackert begins with the open-air painting directly in front of the motif, as he wrote in 1802: “For a few years I have been painting right in front of nature, on the spot, and not just sketching it, but executing as much as possible [..] both are goats as studies based on nature, finished on the spot, the landscape in my studies” (quoted from Nordhoff 1994, pp. 145 and 172). Especially in the last years of his life, during a stay in San Piero di Careggio near Florence, he created a series of such finely observed animal portraits in the Tuscan hills, often intended as counterparts. Hackert's Italian paintings found their way into important collections, including the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, the Bavarian State Painting Collections and the Old National Gallery, Berlin, which also includes his painting "Italian Landscape with Goats and Goats" from around 1803/6. [KT]