Salvator Rosa Sketching Banditti

Salvator Rosa, the 17th-century Neapolitan painter of wild crags and rough soldiers, reached the 19th century wrapped in a legend. As a young man, the story went, he had wandered the mountains of the Abruzzi, fallen in with bandits and lived among them, drawing them as he went. There is no real evidence for it. In 1824 the Irish novelist Lady Morgan put the tale into her popular Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, and Romantic readers on both sides of the Atlantic took it up. Thomas Cole painted the scene on this small panel, less than 25 centimetres wide, at some point between about 1832 and 1840. Rosa sits in red at the lower right with his drawing, and the bandits gather by a cave on the left. The picture seems to have been given by Cole's family to John Falconer, an etcher and close friend who made prints after Cole's drawings, and it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1897. In 1860 the younger painter Thomas Moran took up the same subject on a larger canvas.