In the extraordinary number of paintings he produced, Johann Jakob Frey assigned enormous importance to nature, which always plays a role and which he invariably portrays in the most minute detail.

 From the moment he first arrived in Rome, his adoptive city, in 1836, the feeling that direct contact with nature aroused in him prompted him to conduct frequent trips to the Roman Campagna and the Castelli, right down to the south, to sketch landscapes from life which he would revisit in various ways for use in one or other landscape painting in his workshop.

He focused not only on the splendid landscapes and ruins offered by the Roman Campagna but also on its luxuriant and uncontaminated vegetation, as we can see in the numerous studies that he devoted to the detailed depiction of individual elements such as plants, rocks and animals in the landscape.

These two studies of plants are splendid examples of his depiction of the vegetable world, handled with detailed scientific precision and with the naturalistic accuracy of a botanist

«Frey's predominant interest in plants and trees is far from simply skin deep or the product of chance. Naturally it is influenced by a northern European tendency shared by many Romantics, but the intensity of feeling that fills certain of his drawings of forests and countryside is a product of his technical skill, the result of a study so meticulous and so insistent that it can have been triggered only by a deeper-seated and more complex motivation»

Johann Jakob Frey

Study of a Bay Tree and Rocks in the Roman Campagna

Oil on paper transferred onto canvas, 362 x 533 mm

In fact he was so meticulous in these studies that one can frequently identify the species of plant depicted, as in this Study of a Mountain Bay Tree.