Licenza, near Rome: Horace's Villa

Painted around 1828–29, this luminous watercolor captures the ruins of the villa believed to have belonged to the Roman poet Horace, nestled in the verdant hills near Licenza, northeast of Rome. William Havell visited Italy in 1827 alongside fellow artist Thomas Uwins, touring Florence, Rome, and Naples — and this work belongs to that richly productive Italian sojourn. For an English Romantic artist steeped in the picturesque tradition, the site carried immense literary prestige: Horace, the great lyric poet of Augustus's Rome, had immortalized the Sabine countryside in his Odes. Havell transforms the archaeological ruin into a meditation on time, nature, and poetic memory.

Havell was a founding member of the Society of Painters in Watercolours and was celebrated for his 'pure and delicate colour' and skillful composition. Here he layers watercolor with gouache (bodycolor) over a graphite underdrawing — a technique that allows him to build atmospheric depth while preserving luminosity in the sky and sunlit stone. The scene reflects his lifelong mastery of landscape: warm Mediterranean light bathes crumbling walls overgrown with vegetation, framed by the rolling Sabine Hills. Critically underappreciated in his own lifetime, Havell's Italian works are now considered among the finest English Romantic landscapes of the period.