Italian Landscape

Johann Heinrich Roos signed and dated this canvas at lower left, JHRoos fecit, 1670, with his initials joined. He was living in Frankfurt by then, and the picture belongs to the southern countryside that Dutch painters had brought home from Rome. Roos himself probably never saw it. Older accounts have him travelling to Italy in the early 1650s, but recent research doubts the trip took place, and he seems to have taken his Roman Campagna, the open country around Rome, from engravings and from the Dutch Italianates he had known in Amsterdam.

The painting's early history is princely. It hung in the palace at Leeuwarden, the residence of the stadholders of Friesland, and later passed to Prince William V in The Hague. French troops took it to Paris in 1795, and it came back after 1815. The Mauritshuis owns it. In 1816 it was hung in the Prince William V Gallery, in 1822 it moved to the Mauritshuis, and today it hangs in the gallery once more.