+ Expand

Dimensions: 31 by 65 cm. ; 12 by 24 1/2 in.

+ Expand

Provenance: Lilian and Michael Chapman and thence by descent

+ Expand

Exhibited: Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, George Frederick Watts Memorial Exhibition, August 1905, no.63 as Near Florence:
Manchester, The Victorian High Renaissance, 1 September - 15 October 1978, no 2;
Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Firenze e la sua Immagine. Cinque Secoli di Vedutismo, 1994, number unknown

+ Expand

Literature: Katerina Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy; A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, 1995, pg. 77

+ Expand

Notes: From 1845 Watts resided in Italy as the guest of his great supporters Lord and Lady Holland at their summer home at Careggi outside Rome, the Villa Medicea. This was to be one of the most important and happiest times of his life, a time when he was at his most inspired inflamed by the passion and heritage of Italy. This idyllic time filled his head and heart with the spirit of the Renaissance, with the legends of wood nymphs, the literature of Boccaccio and the oppulence of the Medicis. The magnificent Villa Medicea, built in 1434 in the wooded foothills of the Apennines, had been the cultural focus of the Palladian Academy as the home of the great Medici dynasty, of Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo il Vecchio and Lorenzo il Magnifico. Here the greatest scholars, poets, philosophers and artists of the Quattrocento had been entertained and found inspiration, among them Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Donatello. Watts fell in love with Careggi and the surrounding Medici villas of La Torre de Careggi and Villa Petraia and he spent several years in residence, intermittently at first and later more permanently. The limonaia (a variant of an orangerie, demolished in the 1850s) at Villa Medicia was converted as a studio for Watts and he began to paint with ambitious enthusiasm, painting the first versions of Orlando Pursuing th Fata Morgana (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, see lot 298), and Paulo and Francesca (private collection, see lot 294) and the enormous canvases A Tale From Boccaccio (Keble College Oxford, on loan from Tate Britain), The Origin of the Guelph and Ghibelline Quarrel and Echo (both Watts Gallery Compton). Watts also experimented with fresco, painting the dramatic The Drowning of the Doctor, an episode from the history of the Medici family, on the walls of Villa Careggi (where it still remains).

Watts view of Villa Petraia was painted looking westward from the windows of the machicolated gallery of the Villa Medicea. Clearly recognisable is the medieval defence tower of Petraia, which had been built by the Brunelleschi family and which in 1364 had withstood the attacks of the Pisan troups commanded by the condottiere John Hawksworth, an event pictured in Uccello's fresco at the Duomo of Florence.

The paintings made at Careggi have a intense dramatic potency as though they were painted with the very soil of the Campagna, the artist's hand guided by the great men who once lived or were entertained within the walls of the ancient villas. They predict the work of the Etruscans, Mason, Giovanni Costa and Frederic Leighton in both tone and subject matter and are without doubt the most remarkable of all Watts' landscapes.