Circle of Pierre Henri de Valenciennes – Views of Rome (dated 1810-11)

£5,800.00

1 in stock

Titles: 1. View from the Rooftops of the City – 2. The Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Sassia – 3. View of the Tiber at Port Ripa Grande

A group of three interesting views of Rome having been drawn in pencil on good quality sheets of thick laid paper, then finished in brown or grey wash. All three drawings are unsigned and are thought to be by the same artist. The two large drawings are inscribed in pencil with the dates 1810 and 1811. The buildings in the smaller drawing are identified by inscriptions, written in English at the bottom of the sheet.

The Drawings

1. View from the Rooftops of the City of Rome with the Castel Sant Angelo, slightly left of centre. Inscribed, Rome, (Month ?) 1810, in pencil (lower right). Pencil and grey wash on laid paper. Condition: There is a 3 cm. tear on the lower left side of the sheet, and a small burn hole near the centre of the Castel Sant Angelo, (in the shaded area). Medium to light foxing spots throughout, (mostly in the sky) and a slight burn mark (frame line) left from an old mount. Size of sheet: 13 x 21 1/4 in. (33 x 54 cm).

2. View of the Aspedale Santo Spirito in Sassia from the Tiber, Rome. Inscribed in pencil from left to right, Villa Santi – ***? palace – The Onafrio – Mad House – part of the spirito. Pencil and brown wash on laid paper. Condition: Slight burn mark (frame line) left from an old mount, otherwise VG. Size of sheet: 7 3/8 x 21 1/4 in. (18.8 x 54 cm).

An account by Joseph Guislain during a visit in 1838 described the threefold division of the hospital into large wards (each with its own distinctive building) for abandoned children, the physically ill, and the mentally ill. Respectively 850 patients in all.

3. View of the Tiber at Porto di Ripa Grande outside Porta Portese looking towards Marmorata and the churches on Monte Aventino, Rome. Inscribed, Rome, October 1811, in pencil (lower left). Pencil and brown wash on laid paper. Condition: There are a few small tears on the left side of the sheet, the largest being 1.4 cm. and a couple of short tears on the right side. Slight burn mark (frame line) left from an old mount, otherwise VG. Size of sheet: 15 x 23 in. (38.2 x 58.4 cm).

For a similar drawing see: Christoffer Willhelm Eckersberg, View of the Tiber at Porto di Ripa Grande; SMK Statens Museum for Kunst.

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Valenciennes, Pierre Henri de (1750-1819)

Description

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) British tourists were excluded from the area, a few Dutch artists were invited to Rome between 1809-1812 and there would have been several French artists working in the area. Valenciennes worked in Rome from 1778 to 1782 and was a contemporary and influence on the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803).

The influence of Valenciennes can clearly be made out in these delicate drawings. Many drawings and paintings by Valenciennes can be viewed on the Louvre Museum website. Some descriptions of his drawings at the Louvre mention that the artist would complete his drawings with ink later to make them more precise. This becomes apparent in time when inks change colour. Our drawings appear not to have been reworked or finished as some details have been left out, such as the figures and carriage seen in the distance at Porto di Ripa.

Brand

Valenciennes, Pierre Henri de (1750-1819)

French landscape painter Pierre Henri de Valenciennes spent several years in Italy, mainly Rome. Influenced particularly by Nicolas Poussin, he became a leading upholder of the classical tradition in landscape painting and argued that it should be considered equal in status to history painting. However, although his finished pictures were in a grand, highly composed style, he was also a leading exponent of the oil sketch: he thought that direct study from nature was a prerequisite for his formal works. His ideas were promoted not only through his paintings, but also through his book Élémens de perspective pratique (1800) and through his teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he became a professor in 1812. Painting outside allowed Valenciennes to capture the fleeting changes of a landscape due to light and weather. He was a proponent of artists working outside and painting the same view at multiple times of day. Although he spoke of this as a type of painting mainly of interest to "amateurs", as distinguished from the higher art of the academies, he found it of great interest, and of his own works the surviving landscape portraits have been the most noted by later commentators. He in particular urged artists to capture the distinctive details of a scene's architecture, dress, agriculture, and so on, in order to give the landscape a sense of belonging to a specific place; in this he probably influenced other French artists active in Italy who took an anthropological approach to painting rural areas and customs, such as Hubert Robert, Pierre-Athanase Chauvin and Achille-Etna Michallon. Among his students were Jean-Victor Bertin, Achille Etna Michallon, Louis Étienne Watelet, Louis-François Lejeune and the first French panorama painter Pierre Prévost. Born in the city of Toulouse, he died in Paris and is buried there in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

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