Edmund HOTTENROTH 1804 -1889
This painting, together with another five, forms part of a collection of sketches and studies from life, all of which come from a private collection in Rome and, by descent, from the artist's own studio.
The attribution to Edmund Hottenroth is also borne out by similarities of style and technique with a substantial series of other paintings by this German artist now in the Caffè Greco in Rome, which have been studied and published in an essay by Tamara Felicitas Hufschmidt and Livio Jannattoni entitled Antico Caffè Greco. Storia, ambienti, collezioni.
This work reveals the strong attraction that the study of nature held for the artist. But then, the study of landscape en plein air was a common feature of painters working in the first half of the 19th century, artists generally venturing into the countryside with their palettes and sheets of paper or small canvases to capture the natural element from life.
These studies, which were subsequently used or reworked in the studio for larger compositions, are all the more valuable in that give us a true picture of each individual painter's skill on account of the rapidity with which they were executed.