Beschreibung:

An album of Italian watercolours, fifty watercolour sketches and one pencil sketch on card, mostly mounted on rectos of album leaves (between one and several to a page), but a number loosely inserted, some album leaves excised or partly excised, mainly depicting landscapes and buildings, but also two studies of trees, one of blossom, and two details after Italian Old Master paintings, including: a drawing of one of the Arsenale watchtowers in Venice; a view of a range of hills with sea in the distance annotated in pencil on verso 'On the [...?] Hills looking North'; a loose sheet with watercolour landscape on recto and rough pencil sketch after a painting on verso; a couple of drawings indistinctly annotated in pencil with artistic notes; and a pencil drawing of drapery over a female bust dated 1875 in pencil (with several small holes), some dust-soiling, 22 x 33.5cm (8.5 x 13.25ins) and smaller, original half morocco, scuffed and soiled, folio Evelyn De Morgan was a frequent visitor to Italy, making her first trip to the country as a young artist in 1875 when she visited Rome, Perugia and Assisi. She subsequently visited Venice as well as Florence, where her maternal uncle John Rodham Spencer-Stanhope owned the Villa Nuti, and the De Morgans themselves eventually bought an apartment. This album likely dates from the artist's earliest travels during the mid to late 1870s, at a time when she was coming to the end of her studies at the Slade School of Art and beginning to exhibit and sell her works. (1)