Giovanni-Battista Camuccini, 'A Fallen Tree Trunk', about 1850

Giovanni Battista Camuccini was the son of Vincenzo Camuccini, a successful Neoclassical history painter in Rome. He trained at the Academy in Bologna and with his father. Through him, Camuccini met several artists who inspired him. The landscape painter Giambattista Bassi inspired him to paint in the open air. He would also have known about the outdoor sketches of the French painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes.

Vincenzo died in 1844. Giovanni Battista inherited his studio and then met one of his assistants, Giovanni Costa. Costa was interested in painting from nature and capturing the fleeting changes in light and atmosphere. However, in 1848 he gave up painting to follow the cause of Italian unification. He joined Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) in the First War of Italian Independence (1848–9). Around 1850, Costa was living in virtual exile in the countryside near Ariccia in the Roman Campagna. Camuccini may have painted this undated work during a visit to Costa. Or he may have painted it near Lake Albano, where his father owned a large estate. By the early 1850s Camuccini stopped painting to manage the estate.

This is a study of a fallen tree. The top section shines in the vibrant sunlight. The darker, twisted underside of the tree lies in the shadow below. The artist used fluid brushstrokes for the patterns of the bark on the murkier and decaying underbelly of the trunk. In contrast, he adopted light tones, smaller brushstrokes and freer handling of the paint for the top of the tree. We look up from a low viewpoint, which makes the tree feel monumental, despite its humble subject. The greenery behind the tree trunk may have been added in the studio at a later date. Camuccini favoured this approach in other sketches. Here, the painting of the foliage is far less spontaneous than that of the tree trunk.

Camuccini’s landscape sketches were almost unknown beyond his family. This is part of a group of oils on paper that his family rediscovered in the villa at Cantalupo in Sabina in the 1980s.