Ricordo di Tivoli

“Inspired in its nonchalance and tenderness”: the artist’s own assessment of this painting even while he was still working on it. It is a lyrical work where there is a close relationship between the individual and the landscape, and where there is also a marked contrast between dreamy absorption and the contemplation of the outside world. The singularity of this relationship becomes clear when one recalls, for example, Caspar David Friedrich’s small figures which are turned away from the viewer as they gaze into the distance. Feuerbach’s figures, on the other hand, occupying the picture plane like stage characters, achieve the same effect. In Feuerbach’s works children, naked like putti and heroic, or, as here, in countrified costumes — in any case always with beautiful, idealized southern looks — represent the purity of an existence close to nature. Soon after this, Feuerbach painted a second version of this composition for Count Schack in Munich, and several similar motifs are found elsewhere in his work.