Eugen Napoleon Neureuther

The artist’s estate;

Sale Munich, Montmorillon, 23 July 1883;¹

Private collection;

Anonymous sale ('Property from a European Private Collection'), New York, Sotheby's, 30 January 2014, lot 74, where acquired by the present owner.

Paris, Grand Palais, Paysages d'Italie, les peintres du plein air (1780–1830), 3 April – 9 July 2001, no. 149.

T. Sharman, in Paysages d'Italie, les peintres du plein air (1780–1830), exhibition catalogue, Paris 2001, p. 245, no. 149, reproduced.

Likely painted from the window of the artist’s lodgings in Rome, the composition depicts the towers of Santissima Trinità dei Monti at the top of the Spanish Steps and the other buildings of the quarter. Executed with a plein air adherence to the realities of light and shadow on stone and tile, and without any ideal viewpoint or central focus to the composition, this canvas demonstrates a realist tendency in Neureuther’s art that is absent from the later and more extravagant Romantic visions of Rome and its buildings and monuments that the artist painted in the 1860s as part of a decorative cycle for one of his patrons, Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack, in Munich. Here, only the hyper-saturated blue of the sky, which modulates from heavy clouds at left to clearer skies at right, hints at Neureuther’s Romantic sensibilities.

An inscription on the reverse of the present painting, written by Heinz Braune, Director of the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, in the early twentieth century, indicates that the composition was still in Neureuther’s possession at the time of his death in 1882, and was among the contents of the artist’s studio sold at auction in Munich the following year. Furthermore, Braune’s inscription dates the composition to Neureuther’s first Roman sojourn of 1836–1837. 

Both the inscription and the view itself suggest that Neureuther lived near the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Indeed, the present canvas depicts the heart of the artists’ quarter in Rome: the via Sistina, partially depicted at left, contained many accommodations for the foreign artists who flocked to Rome during this period.

1. T. Sharman 2001, p. 244.