3-028-319 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Summer Moonlight on the Lake of Orta," by Harry Johnson, 1870. Engraving of a painting in the exhibition of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. 'Where can be found a landscape combination of more varied picturesqueness than that presented by almost any of the lake districts of Northern Italy?...There is the deep blue lake, now so calm and still in serene summer's night, reflecting as from a burnished shield the mellow splendour of the moon. And, as though expressly designed to break the monotonous level of the lake, there is the quaint boat of that region...with its elevated prow and stern, its rude sail, and rough awning, stretched to screen from the sun by day, and now serving to shelter the night lamp, whose yellow glow contrasts so well with the pale silvery sheen of the moon. Beyond,...from all sides ascend, wooded or bare, with precipitous steepness or by gentle slope, the hills which guard this sanctuary of nature's peace and beauty. Above these again rise, soaring higher and still higher, plane after plane, fold after fold, peak on peak, the environing mountain chains, till faintly through veils of night-mist and shimmering moonlight, you may perhaps discern, like giant spectres, the soaring crowns of some far distant Alps'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.