View of Lake Nemi

1803 · Private collection

landscape

This signed and dated painting provides a view of the Lake Nemi from the north, with the town of Nemi and the town of Genzano beyond, with a donkey and travellers on a path in the foreground. Similar views of the Lake Nemi were painted by other 18th-century painters such as Claude-Joseph Vernet, John Robert Cozens, Joseph Wright, Solomon Delane, and Nicolas-Didier Boguet.

About the Artist

Jacob Philipp Hackert

1737 – 1807

German landscape painter, part of a family of painters, active in Italy from 1768. He studied in Berlin under the French painter Le Sueur, who taught him in the classical Baroque style of Dutch landscape, but when he moved to Rome he became one of the "Roman Germans" to turn to Poussin and apply the Neoclassical principles to landscape painting. In 1786 he became court painter to Ferdinand IV of Naples. He was a sensitive upholder of the ideal landscape tradition of Claude, which he seasoned with touches of Romanticism . Much of his prolific output was devoted to views of famous sites, which were eagerly sought by foreign visitors to Italy. He came from a family of artists and often collaborated with his brother Johann Gottlieb Hackert (1744-73). Goethe met Hackert in 1787 and wrote his biography in 1811.

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