In the park of Villa Borghese

In the Park of Villa Borghese (1837) was one of Blechen's last significant works, painted after his Italian journey had been fully processed through a decade of studio practice but before his mental deterioration made sustained painting impossible. The Villa Borghese gardens — the great public park of Rome — had been a gathering place for artists, scholars, and the cosmopolitan elite since the seventeenth century. Blechen had visited Rome during his 1828–29 Italian journey and returned to his memories of the park in this late canvas. By 1837 his mental health was visibly declining — he would be committed to an asylum by 1839 — and the work has been read by some scholars as evidence of a quieter, more melancholy approach to his Italian memories. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds this as part of its comprehensive Blechen collection, allowing the work to be read within the full arc of his career.

The mature Blechen handles the park's dappled light through a confident broken application that captures the movement of light through foliage without labored description. The palette is cooler and more silvery than the intense warmth of his early Italian studies, reflecting either a change in atmospheric conditions (the silvery Roman spring rather than summer heat) or a shift in his painterly sensibility. Figures in the park are integrated through light rather than outlined against a background.