A Mountainous Landscape with a Waterfall

A mountainous landscape with a waterfall, painted in 1665, is now at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. Rosa"s late landscapes of the 1660s show increasing grandeur and atmospheric sophistication, the wilderness scenes becoming more monumental as the artist approached the end of his career. Glasgow"s collection of Italian paintings reflects the city"s Victorian industrial wealth and the cosmopolitan taste of its merchant class. Rosa's mountain and wilderness landscapes established the vocabulary of the sublime that Romantic painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would claim as their own.

Mountains rise to fill the upper portion of the composition, with the waterfall providing a connecting element between the peaks and the foreground. Rosa"s late palette favors cooler tones than his earlier work, with blue-gray mountains and green-shadowed valleys replacing the warmer browns of his younger paintings. The brushwork retains its characteristic freedom and energy, though with a greater sense of control and refinement appropriate to Rosa"s mature mastery.