Rocky Landscape with a Waterfall

A waterfall crashes down a rocky gorge in this landscape from around 1644 at the Ashmolean Museum. Rosa"s waterfalls are among his most dynamic landscape compositions, the falling water providing a vertical element of movement and sound within the static geological setting. Eighteenth-century British tourists on the Grand Tour specifically sought out wild, Rosa-like scenery in the Italian and Swiss Alps, their aesthetic expectations shaped by paintings like this one.

The waterfall descends through the center of the composition, its white foam creating the brightest passage in an otherwise dark painting. Rosa builds the surrounding rocks with heavy, textured brushwork in dark tones, making the water"s brightness all the more dramatic by contrast. The spray and mist at the base of the falls is suggested through softer, blurred handling that contrasts with the hard edges of the rock. The composition draws the eye inevitably downward along the path of the falling water.