View of the waterfalls at Tivoli

Filippo Giuntotardi is a little known, yet extremely prolific, artist. He lived for a long time with his family on Via del Corso in Palazzo Pamphilj in Rome as his grandfather was employed by the noble family as an accountant. Giuntotardi specialized in depicting landscapes of Rome and the surrounding areas, and his style was influenced by Jakob Philipp Hackert and other German artists active in Rome at that time.
Together with antique monuments, among the painter’s favorite subjects were natural attractions such as waterfalls, caves, and forests. Often Giuntotardi created large compositions, the size of oil paintings, as with this watercolor. The smaller waterfall at Tivoli, depicted here, is a recurrent subject in Giuntotardi’s corpus. A very similar composition, with differences only in the figures, is also known (Sotheby’s, New York, 27 May 2004, lot 97).