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| Robert Macpherson The Campagna near Rome, featuring the Roman aqueduct built by Emperor Claudius ca. 1850-60 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Robert Macpherson The Campagna near Rome, featuring the Roman aqueduct built by Emperor Claudius ca. 1850-60 albumen silver print National Galleries of Scotland |
The two prints above were developed in the 1850s from the same negative by Robert Macpherson (1811-1872), but have evidently experienced somewhat different fates since emerging from the darkroom. The well-preserved version at top, now in Los Angeles, was trimmed into a graceful Victorian oval at an early stage of its existence. The one below it, now in Edinburgh, remained in the same square format as the original glass negative. It shows every sign of having endured extended exposure to daylight prior to its acquisition by the Scottish National Galleries in 1989. The Getty version, by contrast, has spent the past century and a half mounted inside a large album that was assembled in the 1860s.
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| Underwood & Underwood Aqueduct of Claudius and the Campagna, Rome ca. 1900 gelatin silver stereograph Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous photographer Campagna with Riders near Ruinous Aqueduct ca. 1890 photograph Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| attributed to Carlo Baldassare Simelli Cloud Study, Roman Campagna ca. 1860 albumen print National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Hendrick Voogd Roman ruins in the Campagna before 1839 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Jasper Francis Cropsey Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna 1853 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"During his first European sojourn in 1847, the young Hudson River School painter Cropsey toured and sketched in the Roman Campagna. A favorite milieu for artists, this treeless expanse, punctuated with antique ruins, provided countless picturesque motifs for landscape composition. One of the best known monuments on the Campagna was the Torre dei Schiavi ("Tower of Slaves"), a mausoleum built as part of an extensive imperial villa by the Gordian emperors in the third century A.D. Cropsey was one of several American artists who drew the tower, including Thomas Cole, John F. Kensett, Sanford R. Gifford, and William S. Haseltine. As both a tomb and a ruin embodying Rome's faded glory, the tower had self-evident poetic association, which the artist emphasizes by rendering it with rising moon."
– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum
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| John Cart Burgess View in the Roman Campagna before 1863 drawing British Museum |
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| Matthew Ridley Corbet The Campagna 1895 lithograph British Museum |
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| Johann Jakob Frey Sun breaking through Clouds above the Roman Campagna ca. 1844 oil on paper, mounted on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Frederic Edwin Church Campagna Fantasy ca. 1868-69 oil on paper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Julius Jacob the Elder Campagna di Roma 1851 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Edward Lear Campagna di Roma 1843 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Samuel Palmer View in the Campagna ca. 1846 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
"In 1846 Charles Dickens (1812-1870) commissioned Samuel Palmer to illustrate Pictures from Italy, a collection of vignettes and social commentary drawn from the author's travels in the southern peninsula. Dickens had originally chosen Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867) to illustrate the text, but Dickens' critique of the Roman clergy offended the artist's Catholicism and Stanfield quickly abandoned the project. Seeking a replacement, Dickens consulted with the prominent London gallerist Paul Colnaghi, who enthusiastically recommended Palmer based upon the drawings of Italian subjects he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1840 to 1842. Palmer had traveled to Italy for his honeymoon in 1837 and remained there for two years, producing many sketches and studies that would later by used for his paintings. Consequently, the images produced for Pictures from Italy stand more as recollections of his own experiences than specific illustrations of episodes from Dickens' text. Dickens and Palmer met only once to discuss the project. During this meeting the author presented Palmer with a book of his Traveling Letters, a collection of dispatches from Italy which had been published serially in London's Daily News and were to serve as the basis for Pictures from Italy. He also gave Palmer a copy of the poet Samuel Rogers' Italy (1822-28), recommending its elegant Bewickian vignettes engraved from landscapes by Thomas Stothard and J.M.W. Turner as a visual example. . . . Though executed as studies, Palmer's drawings far surpass the final engravings in quality and visual effect, reflecting the ponderous difficulties the artist encountered with the printers in his first commercial endeavor."
"Inscribed below by the artist – 'with respect to their darkness & gradation, the tender clouds have exactly the appearance desired. This drawing differs from the block in several of its details: but is lent for reference as giving the general gradations of depth from foreground to distance & sky. It is requested that great care by taken of it & that it be returned with the proof.'"
– curator's notes from the Morgan Library