Charles III hunting on Lake Licola

Joseph Vernet's Charles III Hunting on Lake Licola of 1746 depicts the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies — later Charles III of Spain — in a sporting scene on the Neapolitan coastal lake. Vernet worked in Italy for many years as a marine and landscape painter with an international clientele, developing his facility at combining landscape observation with figures. The royal hunting subject required him to subordinate his atmospheric landscape interests to portraiture's social obligations, but the coastal lake's specific light quality allowed him to maintain the atmospheric observation that defined his best landscape work.

Vernet combines a luminous Italian landscape with precise observation of the hunting scene on the lake. The atmospheric rendering of light and water and the careful integration of figures into the landscape demonstrate his mastery of the picturesque tradition.