A Building near Tor di Quinto outside Rome
C.W. Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)
1815
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 27.5 cm, width 31.5 cm, height 38.1 cm, width 41.9 cm
- Culture
- Danish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
Here Eckersberg has painted a building located not far from the northern city gates of Porta del Popolo, close to Tor di Quinto near Ponte Molle – the bridge that all travellers from the north passed over when entering or leaving Rome, and the place where artists would say their farewells to fellow artists who were returning home. A couple of centuries earlier, one of Eckersberg’s heroes, Claude Lorrain, had picked this site as the subject of a wholly classical composition (1645; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), but instead the Danish artist chose an absolutely anonymous building, moving in close to it and observing it from below; an atypical angle that does not include the landscape around the scene. On 25 March 1815 Eckersberg made a diary entry noting that he had “painted a small building outside Ponte Molle on the Tiber”.
