Osbert Loomis departed New York in June 1871 for a months-long European Grand Tour. While Osbert considered this tour de rigueur for his career — as did many professional artists of his time — his voracious zeal for learning framed the journey as one of wonder and edification as he encountered great works of art, architecture, and awe-inspiring landscapes. By mid-September, he had reached Naples, Italy, the southernmost location on his tour. On what must have been a clear evening, he took in a view as fascinating as it was sublime. In a letter to a friend, he described the moment: “The window of my room looked down upon the bay and upon Vesuvius & one night I saw a bright light open in its side and the lava flow from it.”  Seven months later, and after Osbert had continued his travels north and then home to New York, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of its more sensational events of modern history, spewing lava, ash, and molten stone. David Forbes, a writer for the science magazine Nature noted in 1873, “the telegraphic bulletins received from the fiery mountain [during this eruption] became the subject of general inquiry and discussion in all parts of the … world.”

The intense appeal of Vesuvius may have encouraged Osbert, an artist, entrepreneur, and one of the Founders of the Loomis Institute, to transform his written memory into a painted landscape, this time setting his view of the mountain and bay in daylight with shimmering waters, the city’s densely built neighborhoods, and residents dancing on a terrace joined by onlookers. A group of three, dressed in formal clothing and perhaps travelers, are depicted on the terrace’s edge, the male figure pointing towards Mount Vesuvius and its white plume rising against a blue-green sky. Showing this less dramatic image of the volcano’s capabilities made a gentler backdrop for the joyful scene of local daily life, even if it seems a more imaginative tableau rather than faithful recording from the artist’s easel. Osbert’s landscape, which resides with his correspondence in the school’s Archives, also differs from that of many artists before him who sought to capture Vesuvius’s spectacular, menacing flare-ups or the busy maritime trade of the bay.

Vesuvius’s most historic eruption loomed large for Osbert during his visit to Naples. He traveled 16 miles to Pompeii and 10 more to Herculaneum to tour the ruins of towns destroyed by the volcano’s two-day eruption in 79 A.D. The Roman-built structures of Pompeii had been covered in nearly 20 feet of ash and pumice stone caused by a fast-moving current of hot gas and volcanic matter. A sea of molten lava submerged Herculaneum. Both cities were engulfed and sealed when the volcano spew hardened; by the year of Osbert’s visit, historians’ research and archaeologists’ excavations presented to tourists remarkably intact ruins of buildings and their decoration. Osbert noted the deep impressions these made on him: “[A]ll modern structures … dwindle into insignificance by the side of the remains of Ancient Rome & Greece; or if we speak of the ornamentation of … our day — then we have to look for their models in those which have for more than 1,800 years been buried from our sight at Pompeii, Herculaneum & many other places. … When walking the streets of Pompeii and passing the galleries out in the solid lava of Herculaneum…, I felt there is nothing new under the sun.”

While in Naples, Osbert journeyed to Virgil’s tomb, the resting place of one of his favorite authors. He had special fondness for The Aeneid and had spent the summer of 1862 tutoring his nephew Jimmy, then the last surviving child of his siblings, on the text. It was among the verses of The Aeneid that Osbert found the family’s motto, especially poignant after Jimmy’s death in 1867 and the family’s decision to found a school as they faced the prospect of no successive generation. Osbert wrote to his brother, John, in 1886, of his admiration for Virgil and for a single phrase from The Aeneid. “In our case it is an exhortation … a family proverb ‘never yield to evil’ in the most extended sense of thought, word, or deed.” It was also Osbert’s wish that ne cede malis would serve as the Loomis Institute’s motto, as it has, steadfastly, for more than a century.