Paolo Antonio Barbieri, Guercino’s younger brother, was born in Cento in 1603 and, as the art historian Luigi Lanzi at the end of the seventeenth century mentions, was “outstanding at painting animals, flowers and fruit as his brother Giovanni Francesco was at human figures”. Initiated in the taste for chiaroscuro and the vivacity of colour by Guercino, Paolo Antonio would dedicate his activity to naturalistic painting, portraying landscapes, objects of ordinary life, animals, flowers, fruit and still lifes, with great compositional capacity, delicate brushstrokes and extraordinary vividness, collaborating with other painters of the workshop or creating works independently.

The Gardener is an exemplary case for the comprehension of the collaboration between artists and the specialisations practised in the studio: Here, Paolo Antonio paints a composition of fruit and vegetables with great attention on the rendering of the various material substances, while the figure of the peasant woman, busy counting the money earned by selling the products from her garden, falls to his brother Guercino.       
Alongside, one of the forty-two still lifes created by Paolo Antonio and listed in the Book of Accounts can be admired: fruit and end-of-summer vegetables, neatly arranged one next to the other and highlighted by a warm beam of light from the left, which emphasises the volumes and casts their shadows on the polished stone table.