NARRATOR—In this fresh and vigorouslandscape painting, Achille-Etna Michallon depicts a famous waterfall in the Auvergne, aregion of France that lieson the overland route to Italy. Michallon passed through the Auvergne after winning the first Rome prize in the field of historical landscape, or “paysage historique.”Beginning in 1817, this contest was held every four years at the Ecole des beaux-arts in Paris, to encourage the painting of idealized landscapes in the tradition of the great 17th-century masters Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Prize winners lived and worked at the French Academy in Rome at state expense. There, they were expected to learn to imbue their landscapes with suitably classicizing, Mediterranean motifs. Michallon's impact on the evolution of French landscape painting was pre-empted by his
unexpected death in 1824. But his influence was surely felt. He was for a brief but important period the master of Camille Corot, the most celebrated of early 19th-century landscapists whose work we will encounter elsewhere in these galleries.