View of Castel Madama, with travellers on a path by the Tiber in the foreground

The present lot is Koch's finished drawing for the nineteenth etching in his Twenty Views of Rome, which at 166 x 221 mm. almost exactly matches it in size (A. Griffiths and F. Carey, German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe, exhib. cat., London, British Museum, 1994, no. 105/19). A preliminary study for the view is in the collection of the Princes of Liechtenstein, while another drawing which may have been drawn from life is in a sketchbook in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (O. von Lutterotti, op. cit., nos. Z950 and SB549/10). Koch prepared the series of etchings in 1810 from sketches made over the previous decade, probably to raise money during the lull in commissions caused by the French occupation of Rome.
The inscription on the reverse of this drawing appears to be signed by the eminent art dealer Carl Gustav Boerner (1790-1855), although the date refutes this. It may instead be A.O. Meyer's record of earlier provenance.