Giovanni Battista Camuccini

Italian, 1819 - 1904

BiographyOn 30 September 1839, Vincenzo Camuccini (1771-1844), the progenitor of Roman Neoclassicism, in a letter to his friend, Bertel Thorvaldsen, the Danish sculptor active in Rome (cf. Count Artur Potocki, TMA, 1991.64) wrote of his son, Giovanni Battista Camuccini (1819-1904), as “displaying…a genius for landscape painting”. The young artist was raised in an artistic milieu – his father was a painter of renown, and his uncle was also an artist, art dealer, and collector. In addition to what Camuccini absorbed from the environment of his family upbringing, he learned from Giambattista Bassi (1784-1852), with whom he embraced painting en plein air. Both were inspired by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s influential treatise on landscape painting, "Elémens de perspective practique, à l'usage des artistes, suivis de Réflexions et conseils à un élève sur la peinture, et particulièrement sur le genre du paysage", published in 1800, in which the French artist encouraged painters to directly respond to nature by sketching out-ofdoors. This activity became Camuccini’s solitary domain, as he painted studies of the Roman and Latium campagna (countryside). Described as “a sophisticated and sensitive flaneur of painting” with a “singular sensitivity towards nature” and “a rare and highly original Italian artist of cosmopolitan stature” (De Rosa, 2020, p. 14), Camuccini nonetheless was active as an artist only until the early 1850s. Thereafter, due to his father’s death in 1844 and that of his first wife in 1851/52, he devoted his attention to managing his substantial inheritance, doing so from the domain of his estate, the Palazzo Camuccini in Cantalupo in Sabina, north of Rome, still with the family to this day.

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