Master Art

This watercolour depicts a view near the forested mountain village of Casarlano, above the town of Sorrento, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Gigante spent much of 1848 and 1849 living and working in Sorrento, and the view from Casarlano and the woods surrounding it was one that he seems to have been particularly fond of, as it appears in a number of drawings and watercolours of this period.

A larger variant of this composition, also dated 1850 but with different staffage, was on the art market in 2001 and is today in a private Neapolitan collection. Another, smaller gouache of the same view by Gigante, again dated 1850, was in the Statella collection in Naples in 1930. A watercolour showing a different view of the trees at Casarlano is in the Astarita collection at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.