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Lot Essay
Datable to the 1650s or 1660s, this painting numbers among those romantic, wild landscapes that were perhaps Rosa's greatest contribution to seventeenth-century painting, and for which he is best known to posterity. It was the landscapes of this period that inspired Horace Walpole's famous comment when crossing the Alps in 1739: 'Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings - Salvator Rosa'. Comparable works include The Baptism of Christ and the Landscape with Saint John and the Disciples (both City Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl (Wallace Collection, London), Jacob's Dream (Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth), The Finding of Moses (Institute of Arts, Detroit) and Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman (National Gallery, London).
Characteristic of the works from this period is the silver birch tree, borrowed from the early work of Gaspard Dughet (presuming that Dughet is indeed the 'Master of the Silver Birches'), providing areas of lighter tonality that contrast with the generally tenebrist tones of the landscape. Other features common to these pictures are similarly designed: rough cliff faces; angular trees, dying back at the crown, struggling to maintain their roots in rocky crevices; dark waters reflecting the crags that overhang them. The muted tones are enlivened only by dashes of scarlet and orange, yellow - as here - and blue from the small figures taken from Biblical or classical texts.
Rosa's influence in England in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries was profound; his reputation rose steadily, and his name was frequently invoked to conjure up the sublime in natural scenery. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that it was acquired by an Englishman in the nineteenth century. Alexander Barker - who acquired the painting from the collection founded by Aleksandr Bezborodko, Grand Chancellor of Russia under Tsar Paul I - was considered one of the most enlightened buyers of art in England in the mid-nineteenth century.
Characteristic of the works from this period is the silver birch tree, borrowed from the early work of Gaspard Dughet (presuming that Dughet is indeed the 'Master of the Silver Birches'), providing areas of lighter tonality that contrast with the generally tenebrist tones of the landscape. Other features common to these pictures are similarly designed: rough cliff faces; angular trees, dying back at the crown, struggling to maintain their roots in rocky crevices; dark waters reflecting the crags that overhang them. The muted tones are enlivened only by dashes of scarlet and orange, yellow - as here - and blue from the small figures taken from Biblical or classical texts.
Rosa's influence in England in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries was profound; his reputation rose steadily, and his name was frequently invoked to conjure up the sublime in natural scenery. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that it was acquired by an Englishman in the nineteenth century. Alexander Barker - who acquired the painting from the collection founded by Aleksandr Bezborodko, Grand Chancellor of Russia under Tsar Paul I - was considered one of the most enlightened buyers of art in England in the mid-nineteenth century.