Between about 1782-85, the great French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) built his personal library of oil sketches of the countryside around the city of Rome. He then returned to France, where he assembled them into finished paintings in his studio.

A Capriccio of Rome with the Finish of a Marathon from 1788 is a direct descendant from the pioneering landscapes of Nicolas Poussin of more than a century earlier. Groups of figures at the left and right are watching athletes run in to the finish of their race. Behind them is a town based on passages of Roman architecture, but isn’t recognisably a depiction of Rome. This is an intermediate between the completely idealised landscapes of Poussin, and later topographically accurate views.

Valenciennes then wrote up this technique of sketching in oils in front of the motif in his influential manual on landscape painting published in 1800. This remained the standard work well into the twentieth century, and was used by Impressionists including Paul Cézanne. Most budding landscape artists travelled across Europe to train in the Campagna during their formative years.

Achille Etna Michallon was one of the earlier visitors in about 1817-19, when he painted the spectacular scenery of Tivoli, shown here with a Goatherd Opposite the Falls of Tivoli. These waterfalls are more painterly than his early realism.

Michallon’s unusual View of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco from 1818 shows this famous Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, Lazio, dedicated to the sister of Saint Benedict of Nursia.

Carl Blechen studied at the Berlin Academy from 1822, then travelled to Dresden and Switzerland. After he was dismissed as a stage painter at the Royal Theatre in Berlin in 1827, he travelled first to the Baltic coast then south to Italy, where he too painted plein air in the Roman Campagna. His copious oil studies were in a similar style to those being painted in the early nineteenth century by others in the area, but back in Berlin were seen as being radically different.

Camille Corot was perhaps the first major landscape painter both to follow Valenciennes’ teaching and to show his sketches in public. During his first stay in Italy between 1825-28, he developed his skills painting outdoors in the Campagna, producing classics such as his View of the Convent of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum, Rome above, and The Bridge at Narni below.

Heinrich Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake by the roadside.

In 1850, the twenty-two year-old Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin moved to Rome, where he too started painting in the Campagna.

In the Alban Hills from 1851 is a fine depiction of these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. Unlike many artists working in the Campagna at the time, Böcklin must have painted this work in the studio from extensive sketches and studies made in front of the motif. Look closely, though, and there’s a dark figure standing beside a small smoking fire, to the left of the central mass of trees, and further to the left might be the entrance to a dark cavern.

Böcklin uses more dramatic lighting in this Roman Landscape from 1852. Its dark wood is very dark indeed, not the sort of place to enter alone. At the foot of the prominent tree at the right is what appears to be a woman undressing, as if going to bathe in the stygian gloom.

Nils Jakob Blommér’s undated Landscape from Italy is another plein air oil sketch of the Roman Campagna in the tradition of Valenciennes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the young French Impressionists broke new ground by applying Valenciennes’ teaching to plein air sketches they made in the countryside around Paris, and on the north coast of France. They then exhibited those sketches as finished works, the working method of Impressionism.

With so many artists flocking to see paintings of the Renaissance masters in Florence, it was only a matter of time before they stayed a little longer and stepped out into the open to paint views of the city before they left. Far less popular than views of the canals of Venice, and lacking a Canaletto to market them to tourists, you have to look a bit harder to find these marvellous landscapes.

To aid in their visualisation, I again include this map of the city engraved by William Barnard Clarke in 1835, showing:

1. The Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose construction started in 1296, with its dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi finished in 1436.
2. San Niccolò Weir, on the River Arno.
3. Boboli Gardens.
4. Ponte Santa Trinita, over the River Arno.
5. Ponte alle Grazie, over the River Arno.

Gaspar van Wittel’s undated View of Florence from San Niccolò Weir from the late seventeenth century is among the earliest. This looks west from Varlungo, near 2 on the map, along the north bank of the River Arno, with the centre of the city and the dome to the right.

With the rise in oil sketching en plein air during the late eighteenth century, it was only a matter of time before a landscape painter broke away from the Roman campagna and travelled north.

Camille Corot painted this oil sketch View of Florence from the Boboli Gardens in 1835, on one of his return trips to Italy, when he visited Venice and Florence. These gardens are on the south bank of the river, 3 on the map, and afford this fine view to the north of the Duomo on the opposite bank, and the Tuscan hills in the background.

The American landscape painter Thomas Cole visited Italy during his Grand Tour of Europe in 1842, so I suspect the claimed date of 1837 for his View of Florence may not be accurate. His vantage point appears to be in the Giardino Bardini, on the south bank, looking north over the Ponte Vecchio, Duomo and other major buildings in the central city on the opposite bank.

Carl Gustav Carus seems to have painted this View of Florence (1841) from the window of his accommodation when he was visiting. The dome of the Duomo appears slightly exaggerated in height.

Twenty years later, in November 1861, the aspiring landscape painter John Brett first visited Florence, but it was another year before he left England to paint what must be a unique view of the city, and one of very few Pre-Raphaelite landscape masterworks.

Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) was probably started in January 1863, painted without the aid of significant preparatory studies, and entirely from the motif. His viewpoint at Bellosguardo is slightly over a kilometre to the south-west of the centre. Even with Brett’s apparent eye for fine detail at a distance, much of it must have been painted with the aid of a telescope, and it has been suggested that he may also have used a camera lucida and/or photographs. Regardless of how he managed to paint such great detail, it’s a triumph of painting, both technically and artistically, and it came as a shock when it was rejected by the Royal Academy later that year.

Thankfully for Brett, the painting was purchased in May by the National Gallery, and he was acclaimed in the press as ‘head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school’, although by that time he was probably the last of its practitioners. Brett had also intended the painting as homage to the poet Robert Browning, who lived in Florence at the time, and had provided him great support.

My Terrace, Florence (1865) shows the terrace of the Florentine painter Odoardo Borrani’s home, against the city’s unmistakeable skyline.

Telemaco Signorini was another local artist, who studied drawing from life at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. In 1855 he started meeting with the Macchiaioli, and travelled to Venice, where he met Lord Leighton. After military service and a period in Paris he returned to his home city to paint en plein air, when he made this view of Via Torta in Florence (c 1870). He was appointed Professor at the Florence Academy in 1892.

Karl Kaufmann’s undated and unusual view of central Florence shows the Ponte Santa Trinita crossing the River Arno, from the east, marked as 4 on the map above. This bridge was built using stone from a quarry in the Bobolino Gardens by Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1567-69, and its ornamental statues of the seasons were added in 1608 to mark the marriage of Cosimo de’ Medici to Maria Magdalena of Austria.

When visiting the city in 1880, the wonderfully named British landscape artist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon painted this oil sketch of Florence.

In about 1885-87, Odoardo Borrani returned to the Pazzi family’s history with this view of The Pazzi Chapel, Cloister of Santa Croce in Florence, a contrastingly peaceful scene compared to his earlier accounts of their downfall following their conspiracy to overthrow the de’ Medicis in 1478.

With William Merritt Chase and other young American artists, Frank Duveneck visited Florence when he was training in Europe. He had already met and taught the American Elizabeth Boott in Paris when he travelled to Florence. She had been born in Boston but raised in the Villa Castellani (c 1887) overlooking the square of Bellosguardo, near where John Brett had painted his view of the city.

This villa has achieved literary fame in two of Henry James’ novels, Portrait of a Lady in which it is Gilbert Osmond’s residence, and The Golden Bowl in which Adam and Maggie Verver were modelled on Elizabeth Boott and her father Francis, a classical composer. Duveneck married Boott in 1886, but she tragically died just two years later from pneumonia.

Via Calimala from 1889 is another of Telemaco Signorini’s vivacious street scenes of the city.

My last painting may come as something of a surprise: although only in the background, the city of Florence features in at least one Nabi painting.

While he was one of the Nabis, Paul Sérusier remained close friends with artists he had worked alongside when he had been in Pont-Aven, who were largely followers of Gauguin. Among them was Émile Bernard, who by 1893 had allied himself with Symbolists such as Odilon Redon, and travelled to Italy and the Middle East. Sérusier must have accompanied Bernard at least as far as Florence, where he painted this Portrait of Emile Bernard in Florence (1893). There again is that unmistakable red brick dome that Brunelleschi had designed almost half a millennium earlier.