Salvator, a celebrated landscape-painter, was born at the village of Arenella, in the neighbourhood of Naples, on the 26th of June 1615. His youth was characterised by a wild and self-willed disposition. The desire of his father that he should enter the church had no effect on his conduct. He behaved so rebelliously at the college of the congregation of Somasca that he was expelled. Nothing would satisfy him but to become a painter. When he found himself unable to obtain a proper instructor in that art, he resolved to learn from nature. Setting out alone, he was soon lost among the solitary and romantic scenery of the Bay of Naples. It is even said that he ventured into the den of the bandits of Sant' Angelo, and spent some time in sketching their mountain haunts and their own picturesque features. Nor, on his return to Naples, was he less bold in displaying the artistic skill which he had gained. He painted history after Ribera, and battle-pieces after Annibale Falcone, and assailed with satirical epigrams all those envious rivals who dared to scoff at the first attempts of his genius. Salvator Rosa settled at Rome in 1634, and commenced to practise as a professional landscape-painter. The obscurity and poverty in which for a long time he toiled had an effect upon his genius. His imagination conjured up scarcely any scenes but what were dark and awe-inspiring. Yawning ravines, gloomy thickets, barren wildernesses, and lonely sea-shores, were his favourite subjects. The rocks were rugged and riven; the trees were maimed and disbevelled; the skies were black and troubled; and the figures were lurking bandits, wayworn travellers, solitary anchorites, and castaway mariners. The general effect, indeed, was to give a striking and complete representation of uncultivated and savage nature. Between 1647 and 1657 Rosa was in Florence, enjoying a brilliant career of fame. The grand duke and the courtiers caressed him and heaped favours upon him. Many of the citizens admired his pictures, sung his cantatas, and could repeat parts of his unpublished satires. His house was the resort of all the men of genius and refinement in the place. Among these he appeared in the character of a very prodigy of versatility. He acted comic pieces, recited his own poems, sang his own songs to his own tunes, performed upon every kind of instrument, and discoursed upon every kind of subject. The remaining days of Salvator were spent at Rome in the composition of historical pictures. In these he showed that he could transfer to figures the same gloomy loftiness which he had imparted to landscape. "Pythagoras on the Sea-shore," "Pythagoras issuing from a Subterranean Cave," "Jeremiah thrown into a Pit," "The Catilinarian Conspiracy," and "Saul and the Witch of Endor," were terrible and grand. He might even have attained to higher efforts in the same line, had he not been cut off by dropsy on the 15th of March 1673.

Many of Rosa's pictures are in Britain. A large landscape, representing "Mercury and the Woodman," is in the National Gallery. There are also two of his paintings, a landscape and a sea-piece, in the National Gallery of Scotland. The chief biographers of Salvator Rosa are Baldinucci, Passeri, and Pascoli. His Life and Times by Lady Morgan is far too romantic and rhetorical to be worthy of its name.