ABSTRACT
Allan Ramsay may well have known More in Edinburgh, and it would be reasonable to assume that they had met in London, where More studied under the landscape painter Richard Wilson in the early 1770s. Ramsay's own thoughts turned to publication, and it seems that in the first instance he commissioned the Edinburgh landscape painter Jacob More to produce a series of watercolour paintings, some taken from Ramsay's own preliminary sketches. However, between Ramsay's departure from Italy and his third visit in 1782—4, the Prussian artist Jakob Philipp Hackert produced a series of detailed drawings and gouache views of the Licenza area and began work on an ambitious series of engravings. Jacob More and Philipp Hackert were not the only artists to record the landscape and location of Horace's villa. Although the portraitist Ramsay may have been capable of turning his hand to landscape, he perhaps felt it more appropriate to employ an artist who specialized in this field.
