View of the Sorrento Peninsula and Capri, Italy

Frederic Edwin Church's panoramic sketch captures the Sorrento Peninsula's dramatic limestone cliffs and distant Capri in swift pen strokes. This working study demonstrates Church's approach to landscape composition: the eye moves across a horizontal expanse of sea and sky, with carefully positioned landmasses and a small steamer anchoring the middle distance. The sketchy, economical line work—typical of Church's travel studies—reveals how nineteenth-century landscape painters gathered visual information and compositional ideas during their European journeys. Such drawings informed larger, finished canvases intended for exhibition and sale.