The waterfall at Anitrella, Italy

Born in Germany, Hackert spent most of his life in Italy, working between Rome and Naples, where he established a reputation primarily as a landscapist and enjoyed the patronage of Pope Pius VI, Catherine the Great of Russia, and King Ferdinand IV of Naples. He became a close friend of the great German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who famously wrote of Hackert’s talents, extolling the painter’s: ‘unglaubliche Meisterschaft, die Natur abzuschreiben’ (‘amazing ability to capture nature’).
Hackert encountered this awe-inspiring scene when journeying through Lazio and the Abruzzi in the Spring of 1793. He had visited Isola di Sora (now Isola di Liri) twenty years earlier, as a signed and dated drawing in the Albertina, Vienna, attests. Anitrella lies to the South West of Isola di Liri. The forty metre high cascade erupts where the river Liri emerges from the foothills of the Abruzzi. Hackert captured the spectacle in a pen and sepia ink drawing now in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (fig. 1), which he later worked up into this finished painting back in Naples, enlivening the scene by adding goats grazing in the foreground. When writing to a friend in October 1793, he declared the Anitrella falls: ‘eines der Schönsten Wasserfälle die ich jemahls gezeichnet habe … für die Kunst ganz unbekant, ich bin der Erste gewesen der ihn in dissen Jahrhundert gezeichnet hat‘ (‘one of the most beautiful waterfalls that I have ever drawn … entirely unknown in Art, I was the first to have drawn it in our century’; letter to Graf Dönhoff cited in C. Nordhoff, op. cit., pp. 354-5). Hackert painted another view of the cascade from the other side. While the finished painting of that view is now lost (having formerly been at Potsdam, Marmorpalais), the composition survives in a drawing at Dresden (ibid., painting - p. 115-6, no. 242; drawing – pp. 354-5, no. 867).