Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Rocky Landscape

Artist: Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615-1673)

Medium: pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk on paper

Dimensions: 13 in. x 17 1/2 in. (33.02 cm. x 44.45 cm.)

Credit Line: Bequest of the Honorable James Bowdoin III

Accession Number: 1811.70

• James Bowdoin III( Collector, Boston) - 1811.
• Bowdoin College Museum of Art( Museum, Brunswick, Maine) 1811- . Bequest

• Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 5/17/1985 - 7/7/1985)
  • Clark Art Institute. ( 9/14/1985 - 10/27/1985)
  • University of Kansas. ( 1/19/1986 - 3/2/1986)
  • Art Gallery of Ontario. ( 5/17/1986 - 6/29/1986)
• Nature Inhabited
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 4/20/1995 - 6/4/1995)
• Drawing on Basics
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 10/14/1993 - 12/19/1993)
• Prints/Drawings & Drawings/Prints, 1500-1800
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 8/4/2009 - 9/20/2009)
• Old Master Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art
  • Timken Museum of Art. ( 5/13/2005 - 8/14/2005)
• Why Draw? 500 Years of Drawings and Watercolors at Bowdoin College
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 5/3/2017 - 9/3/2017)

Type: catalogue
Author: Henry Johnson
Document Title: Catalogue of the Bowdoin College Art Collections
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 22
Section Title: Pt. I, The Bowdoin Drawings
Date: 1885

Type: catalogue
Author: Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Document Title: Bowdoin Museum of Fine Arts, Walker Art Building
Edition: 4th
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 22
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Section Title: Descriptive Catalogue of the . . .
Date: 1930

Author: M. Mahoney
Document Title: The Drawings of Salvator Rosa
Publ. Place: York and London
Location: vol. 1, pp. 509-510
Reference: no. 55.13; repr. vol. 2
Section Title: 2 vols.
Date: 1977

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: David P. Becker
Document Title: Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: pp. 132-133
Reference: no. 61
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Date: 1985

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: Julia W. Vicinus
Document Title: Nature Inhabited
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: p. 12
Reference: no. 5
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Date: 1995
			
		

The traditional attribution to Salvator Rosa has been accepted by Michael Mahoney, who published a catalogue of the artist’s drawings, and Richard Wallace. Mahoney included the Bowdoin sheet with a group of twelve other pen landscape studies (although it is considerably larger than the others) and dates them to the late 1650s (Mahoney, 503). He argues that indicating that the group is made up of entirely composed views, which were not taken directly from nature (Mahoney, 267). The technique and composition of the Bowdoin sheet are particularly close to the style of a drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (fig. 1). Rosa’s landscapes, both the paintings and drawings, tend to focus on wild, untamed nature with mountains, rocky outcrops, and twisted forests dominating rather than the gentler countryside portrayed by his contemporary, Claude Lorrain (1604–1682).

David P. Becker (edited by Sarah Cantor)

References:

Mahoney, Michael. The Drawings of Salvator Rosa. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977.

Images:

Fig. 1: Salvator Rosa Landscape, 1650s, pen and brown ink, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH 234/1975

Further Reading:

Langdon, Helen, Xavier F. Salomon, and Caterina Volpi. Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic. London: Paul Holberton, 2010.

Commentary credited to David P. Becker (or not otherwise captioned) appeared in his catalogue Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College (Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1985).