Footnotes

• Hackert's records of rural life in the countryside surrounding the Bay of Naples are among his most admired works. The present landscape, which was hitherto unrecorded, is one of several that the artist painted of the Gulf of Pozzuoli. He first painted the scene in 1785 (now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg) and in 1798 he returned to more-or-less the same spot to paint three further views, on canvas and of similar dimensions to the present work, one of which is in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome. All these compositions are examples of what has been identified as a new genre of landscape painting, where Hackert juxtaposes the informal garden-landscape against a distant view that represents the Kingdom of Naples. Just such an idyllic scene - which shows the distant and peaceful strands of the Bay beneath Misenum and Baia, with Ischia and Procida beyond, and all framed within hanging vines - was celebrated by Johann von Gerning in his Journey through Austria and Italy in 1802: 'Reihen von Pappeln und Ulmen, um welche sich hohe Reben schlingen und in Festonen verkettet herabhängen, begleiten zum ruhigen Meergestade, wo jenseits das Vorgebirg' Misenum und Bajä sich enthüllen, hinter denen Ischia und Procida sich thürmend erheben.' (see Claudia Nordhoff and Hans Reimer, Jacob Philipp Hackert 1737-1807 Verzeichnis seiner Werke, Berlin 1994, p. 132, Kat.-Nr. 274-276, ill. p. 458-459, nos. 42-43).
  
  Jacob Philipp Hackert was the eldest and most famous of the five artist sons of the Berlin portrait and animal painter, Philipp Hackert. During his early career he travelled in northern Germany and Sweden and his international experience as a landscape painter was to prove highly influential, particularly after he settled in Naples at the end of the eighteenth century. Hackert arrived in Italy in 1768 and joined an influential group of Germans, headed by Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Rome. In 1782 Hackert met King Ferdinand IV of Naples and was appointed his court painter in 1786, after which he was commissioned to execute numerous idyllic Neapolitan vedute, enlivened by figures in local costume for the King and Queen Maria Carolina's hunting lodges and their country palace at Caserta. Hackert's international fame widened during his thirteen years in Naples, aided by the advocacy of Goethe, who became a close friend and who later edited and published the artist's memoirs after his death.

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Category: Fine Art / Old Master Paintings

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