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.