View over Naples from Capodimonte
  • Friedrich Horner
  • Basel 1800 - 1864
  • View over Naples from Capodimonte, 1840
  • Watercolour and gouache, on cardboard,
    partly covered with gum arabic,
  • inscribed and dated with pencil on the verso:
    Vue de Naples - / par Horner & Müller, / Rome, 1840
  • 262 × 353 mm
Provenance:
Sale with Fischer, Luzern 1998
Paolo Antonacci, Rome

Friedrich Horner found a congenial partner in his Swiss colleague Rudolf Müller (Basel 1802 -1885 Rome), who shared the artistic subject matter of his friend. Both had settled in Naples after 1822 and shared a studio there. They travelled the countryside together and created numerous watercolours in a successful division of labour. An unusual luminosity of the passages of dark colour characterised these works, achieved through the admixture of a special glue and a partial glazing with gum arabic. The old inscription on the reverse of this sheet also suggests a collaboration on this theme.

From the height of the gardens at the palace of Capodimonte, erected under the Bourbons in the early eighteenth century, the viewer looks down on the old town of Naples, all the way to Vesuvius in the background. Alongside the numerous church domes, the Villa del Balzo from the sixteenth century can be recognized in the middle of the view.

This sheet has been accepted by Johannes Fichter in the catalogue raisonné of Friedrich Horner and Richard Müller.