Carole Robb is one of a number of talented British artists who studied at the British School in Rome during the 1970s. Like Stephen Farthing (b.1950) and Christopher Le Brun (b.1951), she rejected abstraction in favour of a figurative style informed by old master painting. This drawing is part of a group of fourteen works (E.3719 to 3732-2004) that illustrate Robb's journey through Rome to Tivoli, and the Veneto, that she undertook in 2003/4. As such, it constitutes a contemporary uprise to the V&A's numerous Grand Tour watercolours of Italy, dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries.

This pencil drawing represents a detail of the lake at Hadrian’s villa, a vast complex of over thirty buildings built by the Emperor Hadrian (AD 76-138) and situated at Tivoli outside Rome. Regarded as one of the finest Roman landscapes, Hadrian’s interpretation of sacred gardens at Alexandria in Egypt made the complex more like an imperial garden city. Although the garden has many formal water features Robb has chosen to depict an area of water surrounded by dense unkempt vegetation. The artist’s naturalistic style conforms to an artistic tradition of working in the open air. The immediacy of the scene is felt in Robb’s vantage point from the rocky foreground, and the lengthening shadows of cypress trees cast on the surface of the water.