The art school of Pozilippo from Naples that brought many Italian landscape painters together played an important role in the 19th century European art. The school emerged as a reaction towards classicism: Pozilippo followers always worked in plein air in direct contact with nature. Many of their paintings are distinguished by warm sensuous palette. Creative work performed by artists from the Pozilippo school predetermined the development of the Naples landscape painting tradition represented by Franz Richard Unterberger, Camille Corot, Felix Ziem, and others.

Italian painter Giacinto Gigante was one of the remarkable Pozilippo disciples. He was born in 1806 into a creative family residing in Naples. It was the father who taught the small boy to draw pictures. When Gigante was 14 he already took water color lessons from German artist Jacob Wilhelm Hueber. Later on he worked at the Royal topography room producing geographic maps. In the meantime, he mastered in lithography, a technique for transferring drawings from a template to solid surface.

Travelers visiting Naples readily bought water colors from the young artist who depicted local landscapes and architectural monuments. In 1821 Gigante joined the studio of Pozilippo school founder Antonio Pitloo whereupon just three years later he painted his first work The Lake of Lukrino. Soon thereafter he became a winner at the 1827 art contest which helped him to avoid conscription for military service.

In the 1820s Gigante Giacinto met Russian landscape painter Silvester Schedrin who worked in Italy at the time. The Russian painter had a profound impact on the establishment of the Pozilippo school and on the creative endeavor of his Italian colleague. Besides Schedrin introduced Gigante to some noblemen from Russia who happened to be in Rome and Naples at the time and the latter began to place orders for paintings.

The painting titled Landscape in Campagna was produced by Gigante in 1843 when he was already a venerable artist. Since the canvas was done in plein air the artist could demonstrate real nature filled with light and air. Gigante was the first to combine in his technique the water color transparency with the dark tempera layers, a technique typically used primarily in icon painting. Art scholars believe that it was precisely Gigante Giacinto and his colleagues at the school who can be described as forerunners of impressionism.