Lot 2069 Dα

Oswald Achenbach travelled to Italy no less than seven times in his lifetime. This work, dated 1889, depicts the park of the Villa Torlonia near Frascati and must have been painted between his sixth visit in 1885 and his last in 1895. By this time, Achenbach had long achieved fame as an artist, and his Italian vedutas were exceptionally popular with the contemporary public. The artist was fascinated by the atmosphere and effects achieved by the light of Italy, which he captured at all times of the day with an intense glowing colour palette. Achenbach “The documentary fidelity of his pictures was alienated by the colouring to dreamlike visions and his modernized colour pictures confronted the non-simultaneity of traditional longings and the pictorial omnipresence of Italy". (M. Potthoff in "Lexikon der Düsseldorfer Malerschule“, vol. 1, Munich 1997, p. 53)

This veduta displays the frequent variations in light and shadow typical of Achenbach's works. It shows a broad path populated by children at play and strolling figures bordered by a high wall leading from the brightly lit foreground of the image towards an area shaded by the voluminous crowns of deciduous trees. We can just make out the silhouette of a fountain in this shadowy section, and its characteristic form allows us to localise the work to the gardens of the Villa Torlonia. The piece only includes two foreshortened windows of the building itself. From the villa, our eye is led on into a sunny area opening up onto a view of the panoramic landscape below the hill upon which the Villa is located. The Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf (inv. no. 4004) and the Szépmuvészeti Múzeum in Budapest (inv. no. 17.B) house images of the Villa Borghese and the Villa d'Este in Tivoli which are similar in composition and dimensions, one painted three years before and the other three years after the present work, which is dated 1889.