The Waterfall at Tivoli

On the back of this canvas Jacob Philipp Hackert wrote, in French, that it was painted from nature at Tivoli in 1769. Nobody can read that line any more. The picture was later relined, backed with a new canvas to strengthen it, and the words are known only because they were copied down before they disappeared. The museum takes them literally. That summer Hackert went down to the foot of the falls every day, always at the same hour so that the light would stay the same, and studied the foaming water against the rock wall, part of it in shadow. He drew the plants with a botanist's care and the houses above just as closely, down to a woman hanging out her washing. The painting belonged to the Torlonia, a Roman banking family, and their inventories show a foreign name slowly blurring. In 1814 it was listed as Hackert. The list of 1892, the year the family gave its pictures to the state, calls the painter Filippo Stacust, almost certainly a misreading.