Giovanni-Battista Camuccini, 'Landscape with Trees and Rocks', about 1840-1902

The essence of open-air oil sketching was to work quickly. The French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, in his influential book Elémens de perspective pratique (1799), recommended that when producing oil sketches artists should ‘seize Nature as she is’. The purpose of such works was to capture nature as truthfully as possible and to become aware of how the natural world changes throughout the day as light and atmospheric effects develop. For Valenciennes and the many other artists across Europe that undertook oil sketching, the exercise of painting outdoors encouraged a greater understanding of landscapes that would be used in more highly finished oil paintings. Artists were advised to focus on the middle distance rather than the foreground so that they would not have to refocus their gaze. This is the approach that the Italian artist Giovanni-Battista Camuccini took with this work.

Camuccini was the son of a successful painter and through his father met many other artists. He was aware of academic thinking around landscape painting as well as open-air sketching. In this sketch it is possible to see his methods and perhaps his intent. Camuccini began by making a preliminary drawing. This can be seen in the lower part of the sheet. It enabled him to fix the objects he was painting so he could concentrate on the effects that light would have on them. He drew three trees on the left of the composition, a path winding through the centre and large rocks on the right. The chalk lines for these are still visible. The artist then applied the paint. He worked rapidly to capture the light on the trees and rocks.

Camuccini would have started with the palest area of the composition, the sky, and worked through to the darker areas in the foreground. A small smudge of blue paint has found its way onto the otherwise unpainted area to the right of the sheet. The rocks on the right are lightly and thinly painted, perhaps only to indicate their shape and colour. The blue colour underneath shows through in places. The original chalk outline of the rocks has not been followed. Maybe the artist felt the composition would be improved by adjusting the height of the rocks. Similarly, although he drew three trees on the left, he decided to paint just two of them. Valenciennes recommended that artists spend no longer than two hours on a sketch and ideally take only half an hour to capture swiftly changing conditions. The obvious rapidity of Camuccini’s brushstrokes and the exposed underdrawing suggest that he gave as brief a time as possible to this sketch.