Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Born in Manchester, England, Harold Broadfield Warren moved to the United States in 1876, and settled in Boston. From the mid-1880s he traveled extensively in Italy, Greece, England, and the Canadian Rockies. Influenced by the English aesthetician John Ruskin, Warren produced meticulous watercolors during his travels, carefully recording architecture and landscapes. He taught architectural drawing at Harvard from 1904 to 1930.

Thanks to numerous prints and photographs of the Parthenon by nineteenth-century artists and photographers, the Athenian Acropolis came to epitomize ancient Greek culture for most Westerners. Warren visited Greece in 1895 and painted several studies of the Acropolis. This detailed study of ruined columns high above a plain is probably one such study.