Josiah Gilbert [1814 •1892] “I am so longing to read your book. You must tell me all about the Dolomites. They are a very interesting people, are they not—a sect of the Eastern Church?”. This is the question J. Gilbert seemingly found himself asked in the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Dolomite Mountains. Excursions through Tyrol, Carinthia, and Friuli in 1861, 1862, and 1863 (1864): a question that clearly illustrates the level of knowledge that the world had of the Dolomite regions up until the second half of the 19th century. There is no doubt, therefore, that Gilbert must be granted a place of honor among those who fostered the renown of the mountains in the Dolomite area, thanks to his successful publications. It was October 7, 1814, when Josiah Gilbert came into the world in Ongar, in the English region of Essex. The son of Joseph, an evangelical minister, and Ann Taylor, it was primarily from his maternal lineage that young Josiah seemed to have inherited his predisposition for the arts. Undoubtedly guided by his family's environment, which guaranteed him a primary education in Ongar, he continued his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he distinguished himself among the students of his year. At the age of twenty-three, he married Susanna Green: the couple lived in London until 1843, the year they moved to Marden Ash, where they remained for over fifty years. It was during this period that Gilbert turned into a highly respected, sought-after, and in-demand portrait painter. Yet, his interests were not confined to the world of painting–or engraving. As D. W. Freshfield, an influential mountaineer and friend of Gilbert, well summarizes, the latter was an artist who knew how to use “his pencil as well as his pen,” which he employed mainly to recount the journeys undertaken with his wife in the Dolomite region. His first contact with the Dolomites occurred in 1858, returning from a journey from Venice to Innsbruck: passing through the Via di Alemagna was enough to spark in Gilbert the intention to return to these mountains. A few years later, in fact, in the summer of 1861, a small group of “English travelers”, consisting of J. Gilbert and his wife Susanne, George Cheetham Churchill, and his wife Anna Maitland, ventured into the Dolomites. It was the first of a rather long series of journeys, which saw them wandering among the peaks again in 1862 and ’63. The year 1864 marked the first, monumental publication, The Dolomite Mountains. Excursions through Tyrol, Carinthia, and Friuli in 1861, 1862, and 1863: a success among a wide audience, a text that stands as one of the pillars of mountain literature, and which brought the Dolomites to the knowledge of a large portion of the European population. It is a book that blends passionate descriptions in full Romantic style with a scientific, botanical, and geological approach, contributed mainly by the aptitude of G. C. Churchill. Between the lines of The Dolomite Mountains, however, an intuition can be read, a suggestion that Gilbert allows to shine through: the idea, that is, of a “Tiziano's Country” (Paese di Tiziano), a land that would have provided the famous painter with backdrops, landscapes, and valleys impressed upon his memory and, more or less consciously, depicted in the backgrounds of his works. It was on the basis of this concept that he worked on a second text, Cadore or Titian’s Country, published in 1869. This is a travel journal in which Gilbert describes, in great detail, the journey undertaken on Titian's trail. It is the account of a search for views, backdrops, routes, and connections, in an attempt to identify the mountains painted in the works of the great master–often going beyond Titian's explicit intentions. Even if the conclusions Gilbert reaches in his book are now largely outdated, it remains indisputable that his methodology–founded on close observation and meticulous topographical research, combined with notes of aesthetic and artistic sensibility–represents an enduring benchmark in the landscape of mountain literature. Following his literary successes, he continued his writing activity until his death, which overtook him in 1892 at the age of seventy-eight.
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