Selected works

This painting reveals the virtuosity of the rendering of light contrasts in the artist’s work: it celebrates the beauty of the Italian countryside, and the enthusiasm it arouses in the walker, at the same time revealing the new “landscape” sensibilities at work from this period. These were reflected in new ways of seeing and retranscribing, through an exacerbated naturalism and immediate experience, a greater attention to natural light and atmospheric manifestations, which later influenced Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s first visit to Rome in 1825, as well as the entire lineage of artists who were subsequently committed to representing outdoor views. In this example of a country landscape, the importance of the interaction of the reverberation of Italian light with the depicted nature and the traditional architectural structure of classical landscapes is apparent. In fact, it is a poetic, even lyrical dimension that emanates from the romanticism of the composition, inherent to the whole painting.

An artist recognized by his peers and by history, Chauvin is nevertheless a rare artist. Our painting, by its workmanship, subject and state of preservation, is therefore a formidable example of these views of the Italian countryside at the very beginning of the 19th century. At the beginning of its history, this painting belonged to Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853), one of the most important architects of the nineteenth century and one of the main practitioners of the late neo-classical style of the Empire.