Landscape (The Roman Countryside)

An important consideration in any European landscape image is whether it is the artist’s own invention or whether it derives from another work of art. While the prints by Richard Earlom and by Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton reproduce earlier drawings, thus putting the viewer at a further remove from lived experience, this simply observed landscape drawing captures the freshness with which a young Austrian would have seen the Roman countryside for the first time. Dies spent twenty years in Italy, first working in the studio of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and later contributing at least two dozen views of Italy to a major print project. He later became the biographer and friend of the composer Joseph Haydn, while teaching landscape painting at the Vienna Akademie.