A View of the ruins at Pompei(Achille Etna Michallon)
The Forum at Pompeii – 1819
Among numerous French artists who were interested in Italian landscapes, Achille-Etna Michallon stands out with a distinctive talent. In 1817, he became the first painter to receive the Prix de Rome for historical landscape painting. After time spent in Italy, he returned to Paris in 1820 where, two years later, a sudden illness led to his early death at the age of 26. Following his death, the family of Comte de L’Espine, with whom Michallon had been closely connected, purchased several works by the artist including a number of oil studies, which they subsequently donated to the Louvre, providing us with a definitive attribution for this group of sketches.
The Academy could not fail to notice that Michallon’s generation of uninhibited landscapists, pioneers who had dared, since the 1780s, to take out their brushes to paint in oil on site in plein air, were setting a new trend. The salons of the Empire had opened their doors to these independents and in view of their success the Academy realised the need to formalize the art of landscape painting. Thus, Michallon, having been awarded the inaugural Prix de Rome, became the first resident landscape painter at the Villa Medici, free to study the Italian landscape at his convenience for four years. He travelled extensively as far as Sicily in the company of Gustaf Söderberg who made sketches, and later lithographs, recording the trip as they sketched side by side. It was, therefore, without difficulty that the artist obtained a recommendation from the Duc de Narbonne, French Ambassador in Naples, allowing him to go to Pompeii to paint between May and October 1819. He returned with several oil studies as well as drawings on tracing and plain paper.
This small study, like the other View of the forum in the Louvre, and more particularly the View of Naples from Vesuvius (1819) is among the earliest surviving examples of work in oil from Pompeii, executed in situ. It is not a detailed study like some of those produced by Michallon or the early French, North European and German landscapists, but rather a quick sketch, an en plein air sketch or pochade, in the style of a small study by Valenciennes. One can see very clearly that the painter’s interest lies in the effects of light on the ruins. The mountains, similar to the foreground, are delineated with rapid brushstrokes in neutral tones, rendering both the direction of the light and time of day ambiguous. By contrast, on the ruins themselves the light is rendered with truth and sensitivity. It comes from the right, suggesting sunset, which the painter has faithfully reproduced using light touches of colour on small sections of the walls, which clearly stand out at the top of the ruins, and thin lines of yellow paint to mark out the edge of a wall or side of a column.
We can place this small study in the category of works which were intended to form the basis for more ambitious paintings. The study was a snapshot designed to capture a moment in time. How else could the artist render later in the atelier the warm light of a rising or setting sun on canvas in a large painting – by relying solely upon memory? The artist needed colour studies made in situ which recorded the true nature of the subject and it is this sincerity and realism which, combined with the study of natural light, give these sketches their appeal.
Private collection, south of France.
Pierre Caillau-Lamicq, ‘Achille-Etna Michallon’ in Pierre Miquel, Le Paysage français au XIXe siècle, Mantes-la-Jolie, 1975, t.II, pp.75-85.
Blandine Lesage, Vincent Pomarède, Chiara Stefani, Achille-Etna Michallon, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1994.
Blandine Lesage, ‘Achille-Etna Michallon (1796-1822). Catalogue de l’œuvre peint’, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, oct. 1997, pp.101-142.
‘Pompei e l’Europa (1748 – 1943). Dalla natura alla storia.’ Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, 26 May – 2 November 2015, no. 2.25, pp. 180-181.