Carlo Bossoli

In the 1830s, in Odessa on the Black Sea, a young scene painter named Carlo Bossoli made his name with what he called optical views. They were large panoramas of the city, made to be looked at through a kind of viewing box, and they started a career spent recording places and events with a precise, theatrical eye.

He was born in Lugano in 1815, and his family emigrated to Odessa when he was a small child. He worked as a shop boy for a bookseller and print dealer, learned stage design from an Italian scenographer, and was selling his own paintings by 1833. Tempera, quick and luminous, became his medium. In the 1840s he settled in Milan, and from 1853 he lived in Turin.

His fortune in Britain came through Crimea. In 1855, with the war there in every newspaper, he worked up views of the peninsula from sketches made in his youth, and the London publishers Day and Son issued them as lithographs the following year. He spent much of the next few years in London, and three views he painted in 1856 are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. In 1859 the same publishers sent him with the French and Piedmontese armies to draw the war in Lombardy, which produced 40 colour lithographs. Prince Eugenio of Savoy-Carignano then commissioned 105 paintings of the campaigns of 1859 to 1861, and in 1862 Bossoli received the title of royal history painter. In Turin he later designed a small palace for himself in the Moorish style and frescoed its outside walls, a building that no longer exists.