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Fig. 1 dimensions as the present work, shows a similar
landscape framing a scene of youths and maidens
Fig. 2 engaged in a game so rambunctious their ball topples
a votive column.5
Comparable oil on panel works depicting Arcadian
landscapes are rare in Valenciennes’ surviving body The 1790 panel is not recorded as having been
of work. One example is the Mercury and Argus exhibited in any of the Salons, but it prefigures two
(1793) in the Bowes Museum (Fig. 3)4, in which the of Valenciennes’ most celebrated works made only
same craggy outcrop dominates the horizon. two years later. Dated to 1792 and exhibited in the
Another slightly later panel dated 1794, of the same Salon of the following year, these canvases depicted
two subjects from Ovid: Byblis transformée en fontaine,
and Narcisse se mirant dans l’eau.6 In the Quimper
canvases, the panel in County Durham and the pres-
ent panel,Valenciennes based the mountainous land-
scape on studies he made in the 1780s of the area
around the Castelli Romani and in fact, in the pres-
ent work, Valenciennes even included a view of the
Chiesa San Michele Arcangelo which is set atop a
high cliff and framed by the distinctive profile of
Monte Soratte.
In fact, an appreciation of the topographical accura-
cy and geometric balance that typifies Valenciennes’
Greco-Italianate landscapes is key to understanding
his importance in the development of French land-
scape painting. A relatively obscure figure in French
art history before the 1970s, Valenciennes was
noted by contemporaries as not only a talented
painter but a polymath, who also excelled as a vio-
linist, a composer of music and a keen scholar of
natural science who amassed a notable collection of
minerals and shells.7 It is partly for this reason
that, however tempting it may be to read
Valenciennes’ Arcadian landscapes as a expression of
4. Barnard Castle, Bowes Museum, oil on panel, inv. no. 437.
5. Arcadian landscape, 1794, oil on panel, 43 x 58 cm, private collection.
6. Spoleto, op. cit., cat. nos. 65 and 66.
7.W.Whitney,‘Pierre-Henri Valenciennes: An Unpublished Document’ in The Burlington Magazine,Vol. 118, No. 877 (April 1976), p. 225.
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