Castle Gondolfo, Lake Albano, Italy

Christopher Pearse Cranch

National Gallery of Art

From a high vantage point, we look across hills, trees, and a body of water and into the deep distance in this horizontal landscape painting. A shed-like structure with an overhanging roof protecting an image of a woman holding a baby is near the left edge of the composition. In front of the structure, a person wearing a white head covering, red vest, white sleeves, and long blue skirt kneels on the dirt path, and a basket of flowers is near her knees. Two other people, all tiny in scale, stand nearby. One of them wears a brown cape, cassock, and hood, and the other wears a high-crowned hat, a red coat, gray pants, and holds a walking stick. Across the composition, a man sits and a woman stands, facing each other, on the far side of a boulder in the lower right quadrant of the painting. The man wears a burnt-orange jacket, slate-blue pants, a high-crowned hat, and holds a long staff. The woman has brown hair and wears a yellow dress over white sleeves and white lining across the neckline. They both have pale, peachy skin. A sailboat is reflected in the placid body of water that lies far below us, and a complex of buildings tops the hill on the opposite bank. The peanut-brown land flattens and ripples gently back to pale blue mountains lining the horizon, which comes just over halfway up this composition. White clouds pile up over the right side of the horizon, and a few thin clouds drift higher up. The upper corners of the canvas are darkened, suggesting that at one point this was displayed with an arched top. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he had written the information on the face of rocks in the lower right corner: “C.P. CRANCH 1852.”