During the height of her popular writing career, Lady Morgan set her sights on an Italian painter for her next, unlikely subject. After publishing Italy in 1821, she pitched a new idea to her publisher Henry Colburn (see Morgan [née Owenson], Sydney, Lady). This new project, a biography of the seventeenth-century Baroque Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa, would facilitate her financial ambitions and her personal enjoyment. Morgan, of course, was famous for her writings on Ireland, particularly her works of fiction like The Wild Irish Girl and other Irish national tales (see Wild Irish Girl, The by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan). Her continental travel writings in the 1820s had marked a departure from her typical national Irish setting, and this biography and artistic analysis of Rosa was yet another journey into unchartered literary ground. Though eighteenth-century English writers, including Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, make brief references to Rosa, Morgan’s biography was the first book on Rosa in the English language and outside of Italy. Inflected with Morgan’s own passion for patriotism and political liberty, The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, published in 1824, characterized Salvator Rosa as an overlooked Italian genius ahead of his time. Morgan’s descriptions of Rosa’s artwork helped to secure the painter’s posthumous reputation in the Western world, defining him as an important muse of the Romantic movement and exemplar of the Burkean sublime.