Landscape Sketch

Born near Naples, Rosa was an etcher, poet, actor, musician, and painter.  Known for his sublime and tumultuous landscapes, with rocks rising like towers; broken, splintered tree trunks, and storms with lightning splitting the heavens, he was regarded as the nineteenth century ideal of a romantic artist.

This quick sketch of landscape elements, including a broken tree trunk perched on a rocky outcropping is painted on thickly-woven canvas that was favored by Neapolitan artists of the seventeenth century. This painting was once owned by the renowned sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), who presented it to his pupil Ferdinand Pettrich.