Isaac de Moucheron, a Dutch artist descended from a noble family in Normandy, was an architect (and landscape architect), as well as a successful painter and draftsman. He traveled to Italy, and especially Rome and Bologna, from about 1695 to 1697, and this experience shaped his visual thinking for the rest of his career. Like so many northerners before and since, he fell in love with the dream of Italy: a place of timeless grace and beauty, with ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces bathed in warm Italian sunlight.

One of the highlights of de Moucheron’s sojourn was clearly the Villa d’Este and other monuments in Tivoli, near Rome. In 1739 he executed a series of three watercolors—more than forty years after his return to Amsterdam—re-creating the views in and around Tivoli. Overtones of love and romance are suggested by the classically dressed couples placed in a boat or under a tree, or bringing food and drink, as well as a Berniniesque marble statue of Pluto and Persephone on the left, while the tall and twisting trees play against the more geometrically regular forms of the obelisk (or pyramid) on the right, the freestanding arches on the left and background right, and the Villa itself, set high above the landscape on the left.