A View of Castel di Cesare c. 1778 - 1779

Richard Cooper the Second made this drawing, A View of Castel di Cesare, using graphite on paper sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. Cooper was an Englishman who spent much of his career as a landscape painter in Italy. Drawings like this one were made for the market. English aristocrats on the Grand Tour were eager to acquire picturesque souvenirs of the Italian countryside, especially ones made by English artists. Here we see a building presented as an integrated feature of the landscape, not so much as architecture but as a naturally occurring form. This aesthetic sensibility was shaped by thinkers like Edmund Burke, who theorized the sublime in nature, and it fueled the passion for landscape that characterized English painting at the time. To learn more about the institutions that fostered this market for landscape painting, you might consult the records of art academies, dealers, and collectors from the period. Art history depends on this kind of research to give us a fuller picture.