PIERRE-HENRI DE VALENCIENNES (1750-1819)

FIGURES BY A STREAM IN AN ARCADIAN FOREST
Signed & dated in pen & ink l.l. p. valenciennes l'an 3 [the third year of the republic, 1794-95]
Indistinctly inscribed in black chalk u.l. of verso
Black chalk heightened with white on thick laid paper [no visible watermark]
37.5 x 51.3 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Private collection, France (previously bore an inventory label to frame numbered 108)
 
 
 
 
 
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was a 'central figure...in the history of landscape painting in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, important both as a theoretician and a practicioner.' (1)
 
 
 
The present sheet is something of an exception within the artist's extant works on paper, being much more of a subject-based composition than the majority of the drawings at the Louvre, who hold the largest body of works on paper by the artist, and indeed in collections worldwide. The artist's history paintings are very much of this refined, classical nature, and are clearly indebted to Poussin and Dughet, with clearly delineated sections of the composition receding back towards a heroic landscape. One drawing from almost twenty years before the present sheet shows how the young artist was clearly entranced by these earlier painters from the very beginning of his career, with its figures liberally adapted from Poussin's paintings with the sort of fervent reverence one would expect from an impressionable young artist. (2)
 
In our sheet, we see figures reclining by a still pond, reminiscent of de Valenciennes’s Narcissus admiring his Reflection painted shortly before our work was created (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quimper), a subject the artist would repeat in 1806 in a work in oil on paper (Private Collection). The latter's composition is closely comparable to the present, with the figures to the left gesticulating rightwards to direct the eye, a compositional device that was first instituted in classical landscape paintings by Claude, Poussin and Dughet. 
 
One of the most intriguing elements of the scene is the lurking statue of Mercury to the far right, partially hidden by the deep foliage. This device appears again, this time in the centre of the composition, in a slightly earlier drawing which Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox exhibited in 1986, and de Valenciennes used similar classical sculptures in numerous paintings to frame his compositions.
 
Please contact us for a factsheet containing images of the works mentioned above. 
 
 
 
 
Valenciennes was born in Toulouse and trained at the Academy there, before travelling to Italy in 1769 and again in 1777, whereupon he remained for the following eight. It was during this latter period that Valenciennes began his lifelong obsession with painting from nature en plein air, working in oils on paper by and large: the practice was a mainstay of the curriculum for the pensionnaires of the French Academy in Rome, having been encouraged from the days of Nicolas Vleughels' tenure as director at the end of the 17th century; however, it was Valenciennes who really pioneered the practice of making small oil-sketches on paper of anything that caught his eye on his walks around Rome and the surrounding campagna. These paintings captured effects of atmosphere, small architectural and environmental details, and above all the warmth and richness of light in the city and wider province of Lazio (and further afield). Alongside his plein-air oils, Valenciennes made hundreds of studies in pen & ink, the majority of which are still bound in their original sketchbooks, which are now part of the Louvre's collections. 
 
 
Valenciennes returned to France to become a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1812, and nurtured the talents of future luminaries such as Achille-Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin, who would continue the tradition of sketching outdoors in oils and become famous artists in their own rights in subsequent years. Valenciennes postulated that such studies were absolutely necessary for painting the more ambitious, composed landscapes that were exhibited at the Salon; however, his primary objective was to elevate the status of landscape painting, which had historically been regarded as inferior to 'history' painting for centuries. 
 
 
The artist's Élemens de perspective pratique (Paris, 1800) included a treatise on landscape painting as a genre, which argued that such paintings should be imbued with mythological or literary meanings, just as the present sheet is with its typically 'Arcadian' elements. This theory presented an interesting parallel to the nascent interest in the 'Sublime' that was already sweeping British and German intellectual circles. Such was Valenciennes' influence that a prize for the paysage historique was finally instituted by the Academy in 1816; however, as realism flourished and the neoclassical taste swiftly disappeared, his reputation dimmed throughout the 19th century, in spite of his outsize influence on generations of European artists. In 1930, more than a hundred landscape sketches by the artist were gifted to Louvre, prompting a thorough revaluation of his work and restoring his place as one of the most important landscape painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.