"“italian Reverie” Young Girl In A Landscape, Oil On Canvas, Signed Carl Wahlbaum, 1843 "
In the tradition of the Grand Tour, Carl Wahlbaum, who arrived in Rome in 1843 from Sweden via Paris, expresses in this portrait of a very young girl in folk costume, seated beside her tambourine in a landscape opening onto the blue sea, all the power of his own dream of an idylic Italy that would fascinate generations of Northern artists and writers. This distillation of delicate feelings is translated onto the canvas by the fresh innocence of the model's beauty, but also by the quality of the modeling and the brilliance of the paint.