View over the roof of a house, possibly Hampstead Heath

Schwiter is perhaps best known today as the subject of one of Delacroix’s finest portraits. The two artists first met in 1825, shortly before Delacroix’s trip to England, and maintained a regular correspondence. Delacroix’s famous full-length portrait of the young Schwiter at the age of twenty-one, painted between 1826 and 1830, is today in the National Gallery in London. Schwiter’s own portrait of Delacroix, completed a few years later, was exhibited at the Salon of 1833.

Louis-Auguste (later Baron) de Schwiter Schwiter was something of an Anglophile, and made frequent trips to London to see art exhibitions and study British paintings. This fresh and vibrant pastel is one of a group of landscapes in pastel and oil, depicting views in and around London, produced by Schwiter in July and August of 1831, on one of his first trips to England. It has been suggested that the view depicted here is looking toward Hampstead Heath in north London. In its richness of technique and intensity of colour, the present sheet reveals the influence on the young Schwiter of Delacroix’s own pastel landscapes.

A stylistically comparable pastel by Schwiter of a boat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, dated ‘13.8.1831’, is in a private collection (Lee Johnson, Delacroix Pastels, New York, 1995, p.13, fig.4).