Grey wash on paper, laid on grey card with an inscription by the artist ‘The Ear of Dionysius’

13.6 by 20.9 cm.

Provenance: By descent form the artist until 2021. This was amongst the drawings left to his son Edwin.

In 1608, the artist Caravaggio was taken to see the cave carved out of the the limestone of the Temenite Hills near Syracuse in Sicily. He named the cave after the Greek tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse (c.432-367 BC). The legend, possibly one created by Caravaggio himself, has it that he used the cave to imprison political prisoners and that the astonishing acoustics of the cave allowed him to eavesdrop on their secret machinations. The entrance to the cave takes its name from its resemblance to the human ear. The cave is thought by some to be the result of quarrying but others consider it to be the result of erosion by water.

In 1806, at the age of seventeen, Swainson, craving adventure and ‘the exotic’ had managed to obtain the position in the British armies Commissary-General in Sicily where he remained until ill health forced his return to England in 1815. It was in Sicily that he honed his artistic skills naturally inclined to toward zoological, botanical and topographical subjects. He developed schemes for publications of coastal views of the island even creating frontispieces for these imagined, but never realised, publications. In his depiction of the Ear of Dionysius he places two figures at the base of the opening to give a sense of its enormity. One of these figures is dressed in British army uniform and holds an artist portfolio under one arm - a self-portrait perhaps?

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