Although born in Genoa, Alessandro Magnasco left the city at a young age and received his artistic training in Milan, where his style soon departed from the more colourful Genoese manner exemplified by the work of his father, the painter Stefano Magnasco. According to the Genoese art historian and biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, the younger Magnasco, who was known by the nickname ‘Il Lissandrino’, made his early reputation as a portrait painter.

He also spent much of his early career as a specialist in figure painting, charged with the depiction of staffage in the paintings of other artists, notably the landscape painters Antonio Francesco Peruzzini and Carlo Antonio Tavella, as well as the architectural painter Clemente Spera.

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