San Gimignano, 1898 (oil on panel)

The Tuscan town of San Gimingnano lies about twenty miles north west of Siena. It is known for its numerous medieval towers; of the seventy-two believed once to have existed, thirteen still stand. Edith Ellenborough lived in Rome where, from the mid-1870's, she worked with the Italian artist Giovanni Costa. Costa was the founder of a group of artists who devoted much of their career to plein-air landscape sketches of the Italian countryside. They became known as The Etruscans. Other followers included William Blake Richmond and George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. In 1891, following the death of her first husband, Edith married Matthew Ridley Corbet, a fellow Etruscan. "The quintessential Etruscan landscape consists of a panoramic view of the countryside of the Campagna or Tuscany: distant mountains provide an asymmetrically arranged horizon; the middle distance is relatively unimportant except to link the artist's viewpoint with the distant spaces of the landscape; the foreground offers a sense of scale and draws the eye into the composition. The perspective of the landscape which allows a high horizon, very often close to the upper edge of the picture space, and yet does not make the foreground disproportionately prominent. ... Etruscan paintings tend towards a distinctly horizontal format, which in itself emphasizes a sense of panorama and causes the eye to look between the framing motifs of the foreground, or through the standing figures, into the far distance" (Christopher Newall, The Etruscans: Painters of the Italian landscape 1850-1900, Stoke on Trent City Museum & Art Gallery, 1989, p. 36)