Charles Lock Eastlake

In this view from Rome’s Palatine hill, Eastlake captures the dense marriage of ancient walls and Renaissance churches, contrasting the cool blues in the distance with the effect of sunlight on warm stone. His wife later wrote, “The poetic view he took of the Italian landscape [raised] the standard of that art.”

Eastlake had traveled from England to study Rome’s architectural history and paint its landscapes. His skills owed much to the British watercolor tradition and its sketching societies, in which professionals and amateurs alike directly observed nature in order to depict its changing atmospheric effects.

Charles Lock Eastlake lived in Italy from 1816 to 1830, longer than any other British artist of his generation. There he created history paintings, genre scenes, and landscapes, including this view of the Celian Hill in southern Rome. From this vantage point, the artist could have seen the Coliseum slightly further to the left, but he focused the composition instead on a less conspicuous cluster of churches, exploring the warm colors of the late afternoon sun along their stucco walls. Against this backdrop, the foreground hilltop becomes a small stage on which Eastlake poses not tourists, but a simple Italian peasant couple, reflecting the growing appeal of costume painting in this period.

Trained under Henry Fuseli and Joseph M.W. Turner at the Royal Academy Schools, Eastlake was inspired by the classical landscapes of Claude and Poussin to devote himself to the recording of picturesque places. He left for Italy immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, arriving in 1816. In 1823 he began making sketches of the Celian Hill from the Palatine. In this finished version, the early seventeenth-century facade of San Gregorio Magno anchors the middle ground at the far right. This church would have had special significance to English viewers as it was believed that from there Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine on his mission to convert England to Christianity.