prosperity". He refused to paint on commission or to agree on a price beforehand, and he chose his own subjects. In his own words, he painted "...purely for my own satisfaction. I need to be transported by enthusiasm and I can only employ my brushes when I am in ecstasy." Salvator Rosa and romanticism Rosa's influence on romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was profound. Art historians have described him as a "cult figure", who "inaugurated the romantic landscape", an initiator of the "cult" of the sublime landscape. One of the earliest manifestations of the romantic movement to emerge in the early 18th century was the English landscape garden, and the paintings of Rosa, as well as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin were key inspirations and models. William Kent, who originated the naturalized garden was known to be a great admirer of Rosa and went so far as to plant dead trees in his gardens to achieve Salvator Rosa effects. One historian noted "An extraordinary amount of Rosa's fame and influence in England seems to have rested on verbal and literary transmission, and had an impact that extended far beyond the borderline of purely pictorial concerns." In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke designated Salvator Rosa as the "painter of the Sublime". Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote highly of his paintings. "His name came to be a kind of code word for the qualities most appreciated by the romantics.....savage sublimity, terror, grandeur, astonishment, and pleasing horror" A number of accounts of Rosa's life were published purporting to be biographies, often including fictionalized anecdotes.E. T. A. Hoffmann. 1821. Signor Formica (aka Salvator Rosa), in vol. 4 of Die Serapionsbrüder. Salvator Rosa was the subject of an opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, a ballet Catarina or La Fille du Bandit, and Franz Liszt included an arrangement of a song by Giovanni Bononcini, in his suite Annees de pelerinage, Deuxieme annee: Italie, (S.161) No. 3, Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa. Rosa and his tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics such as Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and Alexander Runciman. His influence can be seen in the work of artist such as John Martin, who studied Rosa's work in his formative years, A recent exhibit of William Turner's work, at the Prado museum in