At the end of his education, Isaac de Moucheron travelled in Italy from 1694 to 1697 to study the remains of antiquity there. His impressions of Rome in particular would serve him for the rest of his life as a source of inspiration. He thus belonged to the third generation of so-called Italianisanten, who marked the transition to the art of the eighteenth century. At the same time, his oeuvre was shaped by the influence of French classicism, with its underlying elegantly elegiac atmosphere, which also characterizes the work shown here.
De Moucheron made several thematically- and technicallyrelated watercolours in the 1730’s as decorative designs for painted wallpaper in various patrician houses in Amsterdam, a new fashion that had just been adopted from France (Fig.1).