3-011-428 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Autumn on the Lago Maggiore", by F. Dillon, in the Exhibition of the British Institution, 1864. Engraving of a painting. '...of all the painter's works...we really remember none painted with more charming gusto and hearty relish than the little piece we have engraved. It glows and palpitates with the glorious autumnal hues of the lovely Italian lago. The sunlight sleeps on the still lake...it drowsily trembles among the vine-leaves, but permeates many...in a shower of green and gold, ruby and bronze, like the chromatic chequers of stained glass; it flushes into orange the distant purple shore; it turns the blocks of the quay, broken as are the colours by reflections of the blue sky, into something beautiful almost, to the artist eye, as the opal or pearl. Well may the boatman moor his crazy battello, with its load of cool melons and gourds, screened from the hot sun by that ragged but picturesque awning, alongside the pier, and seek the far niente of the Italian's paradise prone on the earth, under the grateful shade of the pergola, exchanging the fierce blaze outside for the softer light of a sweetheart's loving eyes. And all these remindings of the sunny South, in subject and colour, are conveyed with a slight but happy facility of touch'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.