The present painting therefore is not just a landscape, but also a pictorial document of Hackert 1800 moving to Florence.

The “Lago di Bientina” was a lake in a broad valley in Tuscany between Lucca and Pisa, surrounded by Monte Pisano and Monte Carlo which disappeared due to the great drainage in 1859, after an order of Grand Duke Leopold II. to regulate the extensive wetland.

It is indeed precisely Hackert's skill in the depicting of plants and trees that gives the painting an artistic status far above that of a mere vedute and justifies the view of Hackert as Europe's first landscape painter.