Room 42
Landscape painting in 19th-century Europe
Paintings in this room
The Baths of Caracalla, Rome’s second largest public baths, was a popular site for oil-sketching. Here the foreground is broadly worked, the grass flatly painted in a bright lemon green. By contrast the architecture is more sharply and intricately painted, with details in the dark red brickwork p...
Jean Joseph Xavier Bidauld was a member of the early generation of neo-classical landscapists. He was taught by Claude-Joseph Vernet, who had introduced oil sketching to the influential artist and teacher Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. Bidauld was in Italy from 1785 to 1790, where he produced stud...
This painting combines a view of Rome, on the left, with an imaginary ruin, on the right. The distant view is of the sixteenth-century church of Santa Trinità de' Monti, where Claude would be buried. Beside this is the convent of the Sacro Cuore. These buildings are now at the top of the Spanish...
It is likely that Corot painted this small oil sketch on paper in the spring of 1826, a few months after beginning his first of three trips to Italy. He painted a number of views that included the Aqua Claudia, a Roman aqueduct, which you can see in the distance, around five kilometres south-east...
Painted around 1800, this small oil sketch on canvas is a fine example of the type of study produced by artists working in Italy from about 1780 to 1850, who painted swiftly and directly from nature. Simon Denis’s oil studies are often of dramatic scenes from nature, particularly the spectacle of...
The glowing sky is set between dark hills and threatening storm clouds, the strip of dense grey clouds at the top echoing the blue silhouette of land at the bottom. Distinctive jigsaw-shaped clouds are depicted in layers white hovering over grey, blue sky beyond fading to rose and peach at the ho...
Originally from Aix-en-Provence, François-Marius Granet studied with both Jean-Antoine Constantin and Jacques-Louis David. In 1802 he travelled to Rome with Comte Auguste de Forbin (1777 -1841) (later curator of the Louvre) for a brief visit; he returned soon after for a stay of 21 years, only re...
A Wall in Naples is not much larger than a postcard. The shuttered windows, irregular pattern of scaffolding holes, patchy cement and water stain from chamber pots thrown out of the window are the freshly observed details of a particular wall, although Jones may have adjusted these slightly to en...
This small oil sketch of Oetzthal, a mountain valley in the Austrian Alps, was painted by the Danish landscape artist, Vilhelm Petersen, when he was travelling to Italy in the summer of 1850. Close to the Italian border, the area is the site of some of Austria’s highest mountains. We are most lik...
This view almost certainly dates from Charles Rémond’s 1822–5 period in Italy. A landscape unfolds under a clear bright sky; a valley runs between overlapping hills, pale blue hills form a backdrop. Despite the luminous sky the colours are muted, the passage from foreground to misty distance care...
Charles Rémond, who studied with the neo-classical landscapist Jean-Victor Bertin (1767 -1842), won the Prix de Rome for historical landscape in 1821 with The Rape of Proserpina by Pluto (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris). During his four years at the French Academy in Rome, he not only sketched in th...
