This chapter introduces the artists whose landscape views form the subject of this book. The first thing to make clear is that there is a considerable number. The Riviera and the Alpine valleys of north-west Italy were popular sites for travel in the period we cover and many amateur and professional artists made pictures of them. Some of these are in public collections and, although often not on physical display, they are shown digitally. Others, especially those by amateurs, but also by highly collectible artists such as Edward Lear, are in private hands. Many are to be found in museums and archives, often in the form of sketchbooks. These are more difficult to discover, as individual pictures are frequently uncatalogued. Knowledge of amateur work has frequently come first-hand from the owners of pictures and commercial dealers and sometimes via online fora. Many amateur representations certainly remain to be discovered, including in auction rooms and on websites such as eBay and ‘The Watercolour World’, which covers the period before 1900. As part of the project on which this book is based we set up a website that includes a sizeable database of artists, and a Twitter account. These helped us to locate landscape views of our region, especially those made by amateurs, which are difficult to track down by conventional methods such as catalogues, dictionaries and exhibition records.

For each artist we have researched their biography, including how they were trained to draw and paint (where that is known or indeed knowable), where and when they painted, exhibitions they held and critical reaction to their work. This is much more straightforward with professional artists, who have left records behind them and feature in standard art historical dictionaries and catalogues, than for most amateurs. Many of our amateurs were only amateur in the sense that they did not seek to make money from their artistic work. They were often well trained and talented, and developed reputations in their lifetimes, if only with their friends. They also, sometimes, published their work, particularly as engravings illustrating travel books, often their own volumes. Good examples include Elizabeth Batty, Henry Alford, William Scott and Gordon Home.