Vue du temple de Mercure à Schwetzingen
Original gouache on paper, inscribed in German Ruine des Mercur Tempels in Schwetzingen, dated 1818 and signed with the initials P. v. L. in the lower margin.
This gouache belongs to the tradition of souvenir painting, which arose in eighteenth-century Italy with the views offered to travellers on the Grand Tour and whose vogue later spread to other European countries. German landscape gardens shared the same taste for Antiquity, notably through the construction of artificial ruins evoking the vestiges of ancient Rome. The Temple of Mercury is one such example: it was erected facing the Mosque, in the gardens at Schwetzingen, at the...
