SIR, In Alastair Laing’s review in the February 2009 issue (pp.128–29) of the Jakob Philipp Hackert exhibition recently shown in Weimar and Hamburg, he illustrated as Fig.62 a large and much-published watercolour of a View of Rome from the Baths of Caracalla (Fig.46), lent from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, noting that its magical evocation of evening light effects is exceptional in the artist’s œuvre. The reason for this is that it is almost certainly not by Hackert, but by Giovanni Battista Lusieri (c.1751–1821). The case for his authorship was convincingly made in the monograph on Lusieri by Fabrizia Spirito (2003), in which she pointed out the existence of a preparatory pencil drawing for the seated figure at the lower left corner of the Berlin watercolour among the Lusieri material in the Elgin collection at Broomhall (although she too cautiously allowed the possibility that it might be a collaborative work between the two artists). It is in fact entirely characteristic of Lusieri’s Roman views of c.1780, several of which were unknown to Spirito and remain to be published. The authors of the Hackert catalogue appear to have been unaware of the proposed reattribution to Lusieri, for Spirito’s book is not mentioned in the entry on the watercolour, nor in the general bibliography.