Clearing Up--Coast of Sicily  1847

Beginning in the 1820s, the academy in Düsseldorf, a town on the Rhine River, began to attract artists from other German cities and from abroad. Achenbach, one of Düsseldorf's most influential painters in the mid-19th century, specialized in the "sublime" mode of landscape painting, in which man is dwarfed by nature's might and fury. At the left the evening sunlight breaks...