The Attribution—From Valenciennes to Denis: This vigorously executed oil study bore an attribution to French landscapist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) when it first surfaced in a Paris auction in 1976. The artist had recently been the subject of an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre that featured a comprehensive group of quickly sketched studies made outdoors in Italy, in or before 1785. The Valenciennes exhibition took place on the heels of the centennial of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition of 1874. In this context, Valenciennes’s previously little-known informal sketches, for which the artist employed loose but assured brushwork to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, struck historians of nineteenth-century art as precursive to defining qualities of finished landscape paintings by Claude Monet and his contemporaries. Indeed, Camille Pissarro had cited Valenciennes’s treatise on landscape as a useful primer.
The widespread practice of plein-air painting in the decades around 1800 was just beginning to attract scholarly attention in the mid-1970s, when Valenciennes’s contemporaries were generally overlooked. That is the backdrop against which the present work emerged on the market. Yet at the same time, oil studies by a younger contemporary of Valenciennes, Simon Denis, also began to appear. Born and trained in Antwerp, Denis moved in 1775 to Paris, where he worked for the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun. The latter’s support and contacts enabled Denis to move to Rome in 1786, by which time he was very probably among the earliest artists to be acquainted with Valenciennes’s sketches. Denis spent the remainder of his life in Italy, gaining a European-wide reputation as a painter of historical landscapes in the Neoclassical mode.
Simon Denis was a largely forgotten figure in 1976. But many of his painted studies were signed and annotated on the reverse of their paper supports and, remarkably, a significant portion survived in their original state, that is, without having been adhered to secondary supports that would have hidden the inscriptions. These works caught the attention of dealers in London and Paris, who acquired and then retailed them. Wheelock Whitney, then an employee of the firm Hazlitt, Gooden, and Fox, bought examples for his own collection. It was he who recognized that, in addition to a preoccupation with light and atmosphere (likewise hallmarks of Valenciennes), the present composition’s strong formal structure and profusion of naturalistic details, its paint applied wet-into-wet, quickly and with a loaded brush, were the product of the same hand responsible for studies by Denis such as those now in The Met (2003.42.17–23 and 2009.400.40–43).
The Subject: This study depicts a slice of countryside. A wall and towers stand before trees in full leaf, beyond which rise hills under a hazy blue sky. For a long time, the identification of the site proved more elusive than that of its author. However, in 2023 Italian scholar Professor Luigi Hermanin definitively established that the hills rising in the distance are just outside Tivoli, twenty miles east of Rome. Recent technology makes it possible to identify the hills by name: the high ridge in the background is dominated by Monte Giorgio on the right, and Colle Paino in the center; the lower hill behind the cypress trees is Monte Catillo.
Further investigation has identified the structures visible in the picture. The wall and towers were erected for defensive purposes, about 1155, under the direction of Frederick I Barbarossa, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on June 18 of that year, but who met stiff resistance from factions throughout Italy. The Medieval walls probably rose above ancient ones and were perhaps constructed from the same stone blocks; the twelfth-century walls were referred to as
additio federiciana, or “addition by Frederick.” The walls were later incorporated into a larger complex, the Rocca Pia, a fortress commissioned by Pope Pius II Piccolomini in 1461.
It is likely that Denis’s viewpoint was a bridge which approached the Rocca Pia at a perpendicular angle to the walls. Alternatively, he may have positioned himself on an embankment on the near side of the bridge. The Rocca was therefore to the artist’s left, outside the margin of the prospect he chose to represent here. These conclusions can be deduced by comparing The Met’s picture with two more or less contemporary engravings after drawings by Constant Bourgeois, a French artist responsible for prolific picturesque views (see figs. 1 and 2 above). The latter engraving also includes the small church seen at the right in Denis’s painted study, which is identified on a fine map published in 1779, shortly before Denis’s Italian sojourn; it was called Santa Maria degli Angeli (see fig. 3, where it is identified as no. 12 in the street plan at upper left).
The engravings and the map corroborate the placement of the trees in Denis’s painted study, including the two slender cypresses and the massing of foliage to their left. Yet once the position of the Rocca Pia is taken into account, its omission from the picture invites questions about what Denis chose to include, or not, and why. In this regard it is worthwhile to note that Tivoli’s many major attractions are all absent in this view: the waterfalls, the Temple of Vesta, Hadrian’s Villa, the Villa d’Este and its gardens were and are among the best known. However, the elements of the composition to which Denis did devote his attention are not arbitrary. Wall, trees, hills, and sky provide the picture with its subject, and their recession its organizational structure. To these elements one more must be taken into account: light. Strongly illuminated from the left, with emphatic shadows falling to the right, the painting was evidently executed as Denis faced north, in the late afternoon. Taken together, these elements are evidence of the artist’s deep engagement with the natural world
a priori. He arguably sensed the role played by time, not only in the cycle of a day, but also as reflected in the subtle dominance of nature over architecture over a period of centuries. To elucidate these factors contributes to a deeper understanding of Denis as a distinctive exponent of plein-air painting in the lee of Valenciennes, but still at the dawn of the practice.
Denis and Tivoli: Denis must have visited Tivoli many times between 1786, when he moved from Paris to Rome, and 1806, when he moved to Naples. At least seventeen plein-air sketches Denis painted at Tivoli have been identified, to which innumerable drawings can also be added. Tivoli has always been a popular getaway for Romans fleeing the heat of summer, and although the town remained populated throughout the medieval period, it gained new prominence during the Renaissance for its extensive antique ruins, as well as sculpture and other objects excavated there. No less important was the town’s spectacular natural setting above the Aniene River and its waterfalls. For all these reasons, Tivoli was a magnet for eighteenth-century Europeans visiting Italy on the Grand Tour. Indeed, in early fall 1790, Denis escorted the painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun to Tivoli; later in the year he made a painting depicting her sketching its cascades (Fondation Custodia, Paris, 2021-S.62).
The view in The Met’s painting does not show the falls. However, vapor rising from the river is discernable above the tree line in the center of the picture. By returning to the map published in 1779 (fig. 3), it is possible to gain a sense of the distance between the artist’s easel and the river beyond the town, about two-thirds of a mile.
Intriguingly, a study by an unidentified contemporary of Denis’s shows essentially the same view as the present work (
The Met 2009.400.112).
Orfeo Cellura and Asher Miller, 2024
Notes
[1] Valenciennes undertook two Italian sojourns: 1769–71 and 1777–1784/85, interrupted by a visit to Paris in 1781.
Les paysages de Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes 1750–1819, Musée du Louvre, Paris, February 13–May 3, 1976; catalogue by Geneviève Lacambre published as
Dossier du département des Peintures no. 11.
[2] Pierre-Henri [de] Valenciennes,
Élémens de perspective pratique, à l’usage des artistes, suivis de réflexions et conseils à un élève sur la peinture, et particulièrement sur le genre du paysage (Paris, [1800]). Pissarro mentioned the book in a letter addressed to his son Lucien Pissarro, dated December 14, 1883; see Janine Bailly-Herzberg, ed.,
Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, Paris, 1980, vol. 1, p. 260.
[3] The sheet of paper on which the present example was painted was laid down on a wood panel in or by 1976, without its verso having been documented.
[4] Email communications, summer 2023, European Paintings files.
[5] See
www.peakfinder.com (online resource consulted July 18, 2024). It must be noted however, that such tools do not reliably provide traditional placenames and other designations that may be part of local usage.
[6] See Roberto Borgia, ed.,
Complesso della Rocca Pia. Percorso Museale, Tivoli, 2019, p. 26.
[7] Borgia 2019, p. 63.
[8] The walls eventually fell into disrepair and were demolished in the early 1950s, to enable construction of new buildings. See Renzo Mosti,
Storia di Tivoli. Parte prima: la storia, edition updated and expanded by Roberto Borgia, Tivoli, 2019, pp. 92–93, 112.
[9] The church no longer exists; its site is presently occupied by the church of Sant’Anna.
[10] See Branchini 2002–3 and Lacambre 2011,
passim.
[11] The literature on this subject is vast. See, for example, Claudia Refice, ed.,
Tivoli e le sue rovine nelle incisioni del 7 e 800 donate dal Barone Basile Lemmermann al Museo di Villa d’Este, exh. cat., Rome, 1972; José de los Llanos, Emilie Beck Saiello, and Jean-Luc Ryaux, eds.,
Tivoli: variations sur un paysage au XVIIIe siècle, exh. cat., Paris, 2010; and Marina Cogotti, ed.,
Tivoli: Paesaggio del Grand Tour. Contributo alla conoscenza e al recupero del paesaggio tiburtino, Rome, 2014.
[12] Vigée Le Brun was the wife of Denis’s patron; see above. For Denis’s painting of her, see
https://www.fondationcustodia.fr/32-Simon-Denis. The lefthand side of the view is the subject of the sketch
Aniene River at Tivoli (
The Met 2009.400.40).
[13] To this corpus of two can be added a third, later work, a black and white photograph by British archaeologist Thomas Ashby (British, 1874–1931),
Tivoli, (Italy), distant view of Torre Sant’Angelo from Tivoli falls, possibly 1915 (The British School at Rome, Ashby Collection, album 17, inv. TA[PHP]-XLVIII.080). The photographer’s viewpoint was different, but he managed to capture the vapor and surrounding scenery.
