Saturday, April 7, 2018

Later Italianate Paintings by Northern Europeans

Willem van Mieris
Landscape with ruins and nymphs bathing
ca. 1730
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Hendrik Frans van Lint
Villa Madama, Rome
1748
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Pierre-Antoine Demachy
View of Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome
ca. 1750-1800
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Richard Wilson
Italian river landscape with broken bridge
before 1782
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

"The appreciation of nature for its own sake, and its choice as a specific subject for art, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Until the seventeenth century landscape was confined to the background of portraits or paintings dealing principally with religious, mythological or historical subjects.  . . .  In the work of the seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects that were the ostensible basis for the work.  Their treatment of landscape, however, was highly stylised or artificial: they tried to evoke the landscape of classical Greece and Rome and their work became known as classical landscape.  At the same time Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael were developing a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting, based on what they saw around them.  When, also in the seventeenth century, the French Academy classified the genres of art, it placed landscape fourth in order of importance out of five genres.  Nevertheless, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century, although the classical idea predominated.  The nineteenth century, however, saw a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting, partly driven it seems by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God, and partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialisation and urbanisation."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

François-Xavier Fabre
Joseph Allen Smith contemplating Florence across the Arno
1797
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Ramsay Richard Reinagle
Landscape near Tivoli with part of the Claudian aqueduct
before 1816
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Charles Lock Eastlake
Panoramic view near Rome
ca. 1818
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
View of the Convent of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum, Rome
1826
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Richard Parkes Bonington
Boccadasse, Genoa with Monte Fasce in the background
1826
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Edward Lear
The Temple of Apollo at Bassae
ca. 1854-55
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Edgar Degas
Castel Sant'Elmo from Capodimonte
ca. 1856
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
A floral bank, Rome
ca. 1870-80
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Thorald Læssøe
Inside the Baths of Caracalla
before 1878
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Walter Sickert
Venice - The Lion of St Mark
ca. 1895-96
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge