PROVENANCE -

By inheritance in a Swedish family since at least the early 1950s.

The ruins of an ancient Roman building in the Parco della Caffarella, to the East of the Via Appia Pignatelli and to the North-East of the Circus of Maxentius, were traditionally known as the Fountain, Grotto or Nymphaeum of Egeria, in the belief that it marked the spot where the nymph had died of grief. Ovid relates the story of how the consort of King Numa Pomilius melted into tears of sorrow on his death in 673 B.C., thus becoming a spring. 

The fountain was a popular subject for artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was treated by Claude Lorrain in a painting of 1669 for Prince Colonna now in Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples (M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The paintings, New Haven, 1961, I, pp. 409-13, no. LV 175; II, fig. 284). Drawings of the fountain by Claude, Jan Asselyn and Carlo Labruzzi are in the British Museum. Other drawings of it by Labruzzi are in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the Museo di Roma. A drawing by Thomas Cole is in the Detroit Institute of Arts. There are also etchings by Herman van Swanevelt and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.