The reputation of Charles Tomlinson Griffes as the "American Impressionist" mainly rests on his three best-known piano suites: the Three Tone-Pictures, Op. 5 (1910-1911); the Fantasy Pieces, Op. 6 (1915); and the instant suite. They are all the result of Griffes' encounter with French Impressionist music in the shape of Ravel's Jeux d'eaux. In the Roman Sketches, Griffes retains French Impressionist harmony, but reasserts his penchant for clear-cut melodies and employs the harmonies to create a flow that carries the music rather than mainly coloring it in Debussy's fashion.

The Roman Sketches is a substantial suite of four pieces between three and a half and seven minutes in length. They are inspired by the poetry of William Sharp, published in a collection called Sospiri di Roma (Sighs of Rome). While Sharp's poems are not highly regarded now, they elicited some of Griffes' most personal and characteristic music. Each of the four movements flows naturally from the imagery of the poems, yet stands on its own as a fully satisfying musical composition that, if anything, conveys the pictures Sharp intended to portray better than the poet did. Considered purely in terms of their compositional technique and their utilization of the piano, the Sketches are nothing short of masterly in addition to being exceptionally beautiful and atmospheric pieces of music.

"The White Peacock" is the most famous, not only of this set, but of all Griffes' music. Griffes was fond of peacocks and saw his first white one in the Berlin zoo. He came to collect pictures of them, and it is quite likely that Sharp's poem about one first drew his attention to Sospiri di Roma. The piece has an unusually sensuous melody, with arpeggiated "fans" in the piano that obviously represent the male bird spreading his tail in the species' trademark display.

"Nightfall" creatively uses the minor second. This dissonance, normally considered one of the harshest, becomes an atmospheric blur when Griffes places it consistently in the low bass. It seems to cast a growing shadow as the sky darkens, and a sad though calm theme is heard higher on the keyboard.

"The Fountain of the Acqua Paola" is Griffes' answer to Ravel's Jeux d'eaux, though it is more tender than Ravel's or Franz Liszt's Jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este, its two most immediate predecessors.

The remarkable "Clouds" depicts cumulus clouds sailing tranquilly late in the day as they take on the colors of sunset. Since Griffes associated particular colors with particularly keys, he boldly mixes chords and tonalities as the clouds take on different colors, making a more brilliant effect than the deliberately gray sounds of Debussy's Nuages. The composer provided an outstanding orchestration of this movement as well as of "The White Peacock."

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