Banditti in a Landscape

De Loutherbourg's Banditti in a Landscape of 1804 deploys the fashionable subject of Italian mountain brigands who preyed on travelers in the Apennines and southern Italian highlands during the Napoleonic era. Such banditti pictures combined picturesque landscape with dramatic narrative tension — the moment of ambush, the desperate resistance — drawing on the Italian Grand Tour's most exciting dangers. De Loutherbourg treated the brigand subject with theatrical flair, using contrasted light and shadow to heighten the sense of menace lurking in beautiful landscape.

The dramatic lighting and the rugged landscape setting create an atmosphere of danger and romance appropriate to the brigand subject. De Loutherbourg's theatrical compositional sense gives the scene a cinematic quality that reflects his background in stage design.