Fire in a towered hamlet

Alessio De Marchis
oils on canvas
second quarter of the 18th century

This work is one of a series of twenty-nine paintings by di Alessio De Marchis in the charterhouse museum. The original source of these paintings is unknown but they were probably part of a private collection. De Marchis was a well-known landscape painter; he trained in Rome in the studio of the most prominent landscape artist of the period, Philipp Peter Roos (known as Rosa da Tivoli) who contributed greatly to his progress as an artist and introduced him to the paintings of Gaspard Dughet, considered a master of the genre.

According to some sources, while De Marchis was in Rome he got arrested for arson: although the charge against the painter was certainly a serious one, some critics point to the lighting effects of his leaping flames and ability to render the fire’s irregular motion as placing the painter within a wider artistic trend representative of the 18th and 19th centuries.