Genoa from the Croce di Malta

Elizabeth Murray · 1841

Medium

Watercolor and white gouache over graphite on gray wove paper

Original size

18.7 × 26.9 cm (7 3/8 × 10 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Painted from a hilltop vantage above Genoa's layered rooftops and harbor, this 1841 work captures the city at a moment when British artists were drawn to the Mediterranean coast with the same urgency as the Grand Tourists who preceded them. Elizabeth Murray was a British watercolorist who spent years traveling and working in southern Europe and North Africa, developing a practice rooted in direct observation rather than studio reconstruction. Here she works in watercolor and white gouache over a graphite underdrawing on gray paper — a combination that gives her light a particular cool luminosity, the gouache lifting highlights from the mid-toned ground rather than building them up from white. The gray paper itself does much of the atmospheric work, unifying the composition without flattening it. Murray documented her years abroad in the memoir *Sixteen Years of an Artist's Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands*, published in 1859, which speaks to how seriously she took the role of witness as much as artist. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates Murray's quiet precision into the richer physical texture of oil on canvas, preserving the depth of the original panorama while giving the work a lasting presence suited to display.