Lot 42 Dα

Looking at the biographies of 19th century landscape artists, their family and life stories, they display an astonishing level of international mobility, a fact that is also reflected in Hermann Corrodi's German-Italian name. His father Salomon was a Swiss landscape painter who went to Italy, where Hermann Corrodi was born in Frascati in 1844. He advanced as a painter after studying in Rome and Geneva to become one of the leading Italian veduta and landscape artists of the second half of the 19th century.

His sojourns to Constantinopel (modern day Istanbul) in the 1870s, followed by stays in Syria and Egypt, represented a turning point in Corrodi's career. Prior to this, he had painted atmospheric Italian landscapes and views, but the Orient offered him both a new repertoire of motifs and a new, more vivid colour palette.

In Corrodi's paintings, Constantinopel always appears bathed by the red and yellow light of a glowing sun, here in a cool morning atmosphere with the waters of the Bosporus tinted in soft shades of blue. Pictures like these brought Corrodi international renown as a representative of Italian landscape painting and Orientalism. His works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy in London, where the monarch Queen Victoria became his patron.