Salvator Rosa 's work typified the power of the sublime. He was seen as a Romantic who excluded himself from respectable society, a painter of bandits and apocalyptic, stormy, Alpine, landscapes, with an interest in black magic and alchemy.
Sunderland, 'The Legend and Influence of Salvator Rosa in England', points out that many stories about Rosa were apocryphal. Moreover, although the presence of bandits was one of the criteria for attributing a work to Rosa in the eighteenth century, few of his paintings contain bandits. Similarly no painting by Rosa shows a storm in progress, and no painting by Rosa showed the Alps seen by Grand Tourists between Grenoble and Turin. Nevertheless Egerton Brydges in The Philosophy of Melancholy in 1812 made the conventional contrast with Claude:
In Claude's soft touch thy tendrest image reigns.
His evening vallies, and his weed-twined fanes.
Salvator's hand thy darkest grandeur caught...
Piled the black rock, and grasped the Alpine storm.
(Egerton Brydges quoted in Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England, p. 230)
Ergerton Brydges here echoes the well-known quotation from Thomson, Castle of Indolence (1748). This had helped to define Rosa 's eighteenth century English reputation as the type of the sublime and Blackwood's magazine was still quoting it in 1841 (see Works, 3.18n for the quotation and the circumstances). Rocks and mountains formed the basis of Rosa's reputation and are therefore the basis for Ruskin's depreciation of Rosa.
The writings of Reynolds on Rosa, nineteenth century gallery guides on Rosa and Lady Morgan's biography of Rosa (1824), all helped to perpetuate eighteenth century views of Rosa, and the legend of Rosa influenced the multi-media installations of De Loutherbourg, as well as the painting of Joseph Wright, and John Hamilton Mortimer in the eighteenth century, and of John Martin, in the nineteenth century.