Andreas Achenbach - Clearing Up—Coast of Sicily - Walters 37116

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. The tattered American flag on the rocks in the foreground implies that there is a shipwreck just out of view.