Carl Reichert originates from a family of painters, both his father, brother and uncle were painters and it was with his uncle Franz Heinrich Reichert, a watercolour painter, that he first visited Rome in the 1860s. He studied at the Drawing Academy in Graz and worked with the painter Josef Kuwasseg. Reichert painted topical scenes around ​​Graz and many of these were later lithographed. He lived at Piazza Barberini in Rome between 1867 and 1869, where he worked with the famous landscape painter Anton Romako. Reichert's Roman paintings were popular with rich foreigners, who visited Rome.

With this impressive, almost monumental panorama over the Roman Forum, Carl Reichert has depicted, among other things, the Saint Luca and Martina Church, the Septimius Severus Arch, the Phocal Column, the columns of the Temple of Vespasian and just behind them the columns of the Temple of Saturn. To the right are the distinctive buildings on the Capitoline Hill. The painter has devised the work with light and shadow effects so that parts of the foreground are shaded, while the sun's rays hit the church dome and the recognizable antique buildings.

Provenance: Mr Kingsley, London. Private collection in Montreal.