Painting Detail
View of the Villa Ludovisi Park in RomeArtist: Claude Joseph Vernet
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 74.5x99.5 cm
Date: 1749
Genre: Landscape
Source: Museum of the Academy of Arts, Petrograd, 1922
Claude Joseph Vernet was perhaps one of the first French 18th-century landscape painters to seek to combine the old, academic traditions with new realistic experiments. Before us is not merely a landscape with architecture but lively little scenes of jolly girls running from the splashing of the fountain, ladies and gentlemen walking, and the artist himself with his album and pencil in his hand, his wife and his son Livio. These little genre scenes set into the landscape brought the author no less fame than the landscapes himself. His works were purchased by Catherine II and Paul I housed a collection of works by the artist in his summer palaces at Gatchina and Pavlovsk.