The Tivoli Waterfalls, Charcoal And White Chalk Highlights, End Of The 18th Century Or Early 19

Large drawing representing the Tivoli waterfalls, a landscape that was particularly popular with European artists in the last third of the 18th and the first third of the 19th century as part of the fascination of intellectual and economic elites for antiquity and Italy. Our landscape, a charcoal drawing with white chalk highlights on laid paper, is fully in line with this form of travel, an initiation for the artists of the time, which contemporaries called the "Grand Tour". It is a natural site located in Tivoli, a town on the outskirts of Rome that was already home to two of the most famous villas of Antiquity and the Mannerist Renaissance: Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este. These waterfalls inspired renowned artists, Vernet and Hubert Robert, to name but a few, who depicted them at will. The work is of a very beautiful quality, the landscape skillfully captured by masses of shadow and light worked in a delicate blur, giving the whole a vaporous aspect in phase with the subject. Three female figures evoke that of the nymph, as it is imagined and reinterpreted by classical figuration, for example in the sculpted group of Apollo served by the Nymphs at the Palace of Versailles, whose attitudes and hairstyles are to be compared. A trace of vertical folding in the middle of the work. Very beautiful freshness elsewhere. We date the drawing from the beginning of the 19th century. Dimensions 470 x 320 mm