Johann Joachim Faber began his education at Friedrich Ludwig Waagen’s school for painting and drawing in Hamburg. At 19, he set off on study journeys across Europe, training at the academy in Vienna and travelling through Italy for the first time from 1806 to 1808. Afterwards he returned to Hamburg, where he established himself as a portraitist and engraver.
In 1816, he was drawn again to Rome, where he would attach himself for the next eleven years to the large group of German artists and discover his love of landscape painting. In the summer of 1823, Faber undertook, along with his colleagues Heinrich Reinhold (1788-1825) and Carl Wilhelm Götzloff (1799-1866), an extended journey to the Gulf of Naples, where they were particularly fascinated by the picturesque natural surroundings of Sorrento. This is attested not only by com - parable sketches but also by Faber’s thematically related oil studies in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, where the bulk of his drawings are preserved (Fig. 1).