Signed with monogram and dated l.r.: AL/1882

Watercolour, 41.5 by 33 cm

Provenance: Chris Beetles

From the 1860s Florence would become the principal destination for artists who identified with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, painting the city’s architecture and monuments with same intensity of colour and detail that characterised much of the city’s great Quattrocento art (which such painters would of course be closely studying at the same time). A number of British artists settled in the city, amongst them John Wharlton Bunney, Henry Roderick Newman and Roddam Spencer Stanhope (for a further discussion on this subject see Allan Staley’s essay Holy Lands in Allan Staley and Christopher Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision, Truth to Nature, Tate Publishing, 2004 (pp.100-103). Lucas’s view of the Ponte Vecchio from 1882 follows closely in the tradition of these artists and of course of John Ruskin whose painstaking watercolours of the city’s architecture from early in the previous decade bear some comparison with this fine work.