In 1998, a cache of drawings by the little-known printmaker and pupil of Ingres, Charles Damour, emerged on the Paris art market. The sheets were from the artist's travels in Italy during the 1830s. Drawing in black and white chalk on blue paper, he typically inscribed each sheet with the site name or subject, his signature, and a date. Damour later mounted these drawings to pale blue album leaves bearing a French watermark.
This view drawn in Sicily in the summer of 1836 shows the twelfth-century Norman cathedral of Palermo and the city's Porta Nuova, the monumental seventeenth-century city gate. Other drawings inscribed Palermo by Damour reveal that it was part of a more extensive drawing campaign in the area from the summer of 1836. A small painting with a view of a convent and a woman with a basket of fruit greeting two monks is in the museum at Nemours.
Inscribed in pen and brown ink, at lower right, "Palermo. 9 juillet 1836"; on verso, in graphite, at lower right, "La Cathd́rale et la Porta Nuova. / Vue prise près des murs extérieurs / de Palerme. Ch. D. ft. 9 juillet 1836"; also in graphite, in opposite direction, at upper left, "La Cathédrale et la Porta Nuova à Palerme / Palerme, Ch. D. ft 9 juillet 1836".