(Amersfoort 1653–1736 Rome)
An Ideal River Landscape,
oil on canvas, 51 x 105 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Leasarte, Milan;
Private collection, Rome

Exhibited:
Paesaggi, Vedute e Architetture del Grand Tour: itinerario turistico-culturale del ’700, Rome 22nd April - 15th May 1988 and Milan 10th June - 10th July 1988, p. 30, ill. 12 (as Gaspar van Wittel).

Literature:
Paesaggi, Vedute e Architetture del Grand Tour: itinerario turistico-culturale del ’700, exhibition catalogue, Rome - Milan 1988, p. 30, ill. 12 (as Gaspar van Wittel);
G. Briganti, L. Laureati, L. Trezzani (ed), Gaspar van Wittel, Milano 1996, pp. 293-294, ill. 451 (as Gaspar van Wittel).

We are grateful to Laura Laureati for reconfirming the attribution after examining the present painting in the original.

The present composition shows a town in a valley that slopes gently to the right towards a river in the foreground, while on the left a large rock juts up, forming a wing to the composition. The little figures, which are comparable to those in the artist’s late works, move along the road leading down to the river bank, where there is also a fisherman. The present work is characterised by the kind of veduta or view for which the artist became celebrated and which at first sight might be interpreted as a real view. The painter used elements taken from life as a starting point to contrive compositions that look extremely plausible.

Although noted by art historians as the precursor to the 18th century Italian school of vedutismo, of which Canaletto is the best-known representative, very little is known about Gaspar Van Wittel. However, his oeuvre allow us to retrace his travels through Italy between the 17th and 18th centuries via the depiction of the urban views, some of which have disappeared or changed greatly today, and which show us how these locations appeared to the first travellers enjoying the “Grand Tour”.

Van Wittel was a Dutch painter and draughtsman who was mainly active in Italy. After early training in Amersfoort in the workshop of Matthias Withoos, he went to Rome at the age of 20, where he is first recorded in 1675 and became known as Vanvitelli. He began working with the engineer Cornelis Meyer to create survey drawings along the River Tiber. It was this project that determined the elements that would characterise all his future production of Italian vista which were typified by a taste for detail and the descriptive, clear layout of the Northern European school of landscape painting. While van Wittel’s ideal landscapes are not so well known, he actually produced many of these in the last period of his artistic production, especially as small gouaches and drawings; far fewer were executed in oils, such as the present painting.

The present composition is included in the updated edition of the Briganti´s 1966 monograph (see: G. Briganti, L. Laureati, Trezzani L. (eds.), Gaspar van Wittel, pp. 293-294, ill. 451) and it has been dated around the middle of the 1730s.