Hackert depicts a view from the west of Diomedes' villa in Pompeii, located outside the city walls at the Herculaneum Gate on the Via dei Sepolcri. The excavations in the ancient city of Vesuvius, which began in 1748, were carried out behind closed doors, with the finds published in large, magnificent volumes entitled Antichità di Ercolano esposte. Outside artists were strictly forbidden from drawing – they bribed the guards to gain access to Pompeii. Hackert did not need to do this. As the first court painter in Naples since April 1786, he had access to the king at any time; his friendship with the head of excavations in Pompeii, the archaeologist Francesco La Vega, will have done the rest. Hackert received official permission to paint in Pompeii. The project was to be a major undertaking: the artist planned a series of six views of important Pompeian monuments, which his brother Georg Hackert was to transfer to etching. In December 1792, as we read in a letter dated the 4th of that month to the Courland baron Heinrich von Offenberg, he was eagerly at work: ‘In Pompejana I have made six views, which I am now painting in gouache and which Georg will engrave; this is something curious and new for the European public.’ In 1794, the gouaches, two of which are now in the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and one in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts, were completed; the etchings took until 1797 to finish. Hackert's certainty that this series of paintings, which he described as ‘curious new works’, would sell well to Grand Tour audiences is reminiscent of the artist's business acumen. Regardless of this, however, he was first and foremost a landscape painter, and this is what makes the sixth and last gouache in the cycle, which he himself described as ‘Landhauß’ (country house), so appealing. Delicate trees grow between the ancient columns of the courtyard, low bushes cover the ground in garden beds, and vines climb mulberry trees above the surrounding wall, a practice common in the Naples area. The picture provides a faithful documentation of the ancient villa – but it is also a garden idyll in a landscape that, according to Goethe in his Italian Journey (14 March 1787), ‘is entirely a garden’. Perhaps the most beautiful thing one could find on a walk through Pompeii. Claudia Nordhoff