Caspar Van Wittel Biography | Oil Paintings
12-1653 Amersfoort, NED – 9-13-1736 Rome, ITA

Caspar Van Wittel was a Dutch painter who made a career in Rome where he played a pivotal role in the development of the genre of topographical painting known as veduta. Van Wittel studied painting in his hometown of Amersfoort with Thomas Jansz van Veenendaal for 5 years and then with Matthias Withoos for 7 years.
Caspar Andriaans Van Wittel spent almost all his life in Italy where he arrived in 1674 and died in 1736. He lived mainly in Rome but, particularly between 1694 and 1710, he also toured the country and painted in Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Milan, Piacenza, Urbino, and Naples.
Van Wittel and The Invention of the Roman Veduta.
The “Roman landscape”, which reworked the style and settings invented in the “ideal landscapes” of seventeenth-century painting in Emilia and France, became established on the European art market as a virtually separate genre. The birth of the Veduta around 1675 coincided with the arrival in Rome of the Dutch artist Caspar van Wittel. Van Wittel had too strong a sense of reality to attempt any classically oriented idealization. He was probably one of the first to use a camera obscura, a viewing device whose system of projecting an image onto a flat surface was technically similar to a photographic camera.
The “Roman landscape” genre continued to enjoy great favor until Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Joseph Mallord William Turner. It functioned on many different levels: as an exercise in perspective for young artists, as a theme that was sure to sell well, as a nostalgic evocation, or as a Romantic interpretation of nature and the past.
Caspar Van Wittel's composition and perspective principles remained the same from the 1690s, only the subject matter changed. His work was very popular with travelers on their Grand Tour of Italy.
The main destination for the French, English, and Germans on the Grand Tour was Italy. To be fully a cultured person, one had to follow a certain regime, and make certain stops according to the first guidebooks. Italy was not the grand country of the past imagination, it was a magnificent but backward nation, the partially unaware custodian of treasures of the past. Immersed in breathtaking landscapes, the conservation of its monuments left much to be desired. The Vedutisti genre started by Van Wittel and others did a great service in helping to make people aware and to preserve history.
Art Movement: Baroque Art.
Artists Influencing Van Wittel: Matthias Withoos.
He Traveled To Italy.
Painters Caspar Van Wittel Influenced: Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.
Caspar Van Wittel Hand-Painted Oil Painting Reproductions.
Caspar Van Wittel Museum Art Replicas on Canvas.
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