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 behest of Charles Theodore, Elector Palatine. Engravings depicting the building, in circulation from the late eighteenth century onwards, show a composition very close to that of the present gouache: a view taken from a path, strollers, the lake separating the temple from the viewer. Copying after prints was then a widespread practice among amateurs, yet the painter of this work brought a measure of invention to it by adding the figure of a fisherman.