Mendicants of the Roman Campagna

Edward Villiers Rippingille's Mendicants of the Roman Campagna, painted in 1840, depicts Italian beggars in the countryside surrounding Rome. Rippingille was a Bristol painter who traveled to Italy in the 1830s, where he painted genre scenes of Italian peasant life. The Roman Campagna — the rural plain surrounding Rome — was populated by shepherds, banditti, and the rural poor who became stock subjects for visiting northern European artists.

The oil on canvas shows Rippingille's warm, Italian-influenced palette and his careful observation of figure types and costume. The atmospheric Roman light and the naturalistic rendering of the landscape setting demonstrate his engagement with the Italianate genre tradition.