Clearing Up--Coast of Sicily

Description Beginning in the 1820s, the academy in Düsseldorf, a town on the Rhine River, began to attract artists from other German cities and from abroad. Achenbach, one of Düsseldorf's most influential painters in the mid-19th century, specialized in the "sublime" mode of landscape painting, in which man is dwarfed by nature's might and fury. The tattered American flag on the rocks in the foreground implies that there is a shipwreck just out of view.

Conservation

Date	Description	Narrative
3/16/1978	Treatment	cleaned

Exhibitions

• German 19th Century Paintings and Drawings. The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. 1983.
• Savings Bank of Baltimore Special Display. The Savings Bank of Baltimore, Baltimore. 1984.
• Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2000-2001.

Provenance The Düsseldorf Gallery, New York [John Godfrey Boker, proprietor], 1849-1857; Cosmopolitan Art Association of Sandusky, Ohio, 1857-1862 [mode of acquisition unknown]; John Wolfe [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; John Wolfe Sale, December 22, 1863 (?); William T. Walters, Baltimore, 1863 (?), by purchase; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Inscriptions [Signature] In black on lower left: A. Achenbach; [Date] In black on lower left: 1847

Credit Acquired by William T. Walters, 1863 (?)