‘Forgotten’ artist’s work set for show

AN exhibition featuring the work of one of the most gifted landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is to open at the Scottish National Gallery.

The show will be the first to be devoted to Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754-1821), an artist widely acclaimed in his lifetime but whose work has been overlooked in the last 200 years.

Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, much of Lusieri’s life story reads like a film script – he was employed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was closely involved with the removal of the Elgin Marbles from Greece to Britain and, tragically, a large proportion of his later work was destroyed at sea after his death, leaving his reputation to descend into obscurity.

The exhibition, which runs from June 30 until October 28, will feature 85 watercolours and drawings, plus his only two known works in oil.