Classical Landscape with Figures Drinking by a Fountain

“Elevating Nature above itself carries profound and delightful sensations for the soul,” wrote Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes in his treatise on perspective. Credited with reinvigorating landscape painting, Valenciennes spent much of the period of 1777–1784/85 in and around Rome, where he made numerous drawings and sketches to capture the evanescent effects of nature. “Work in haste, so as to seize Nature as she is,” he would write. The second stage of Valenciennes’s creative process was carried out in the studio, where, relying on his studies as well as his recollections, he would paint what he called his “memory pieces” of Nature perfected: the Ideal landscape. For Valenciennes the oil sketch made on the spot and the finished constructed, ideal landscape were complementary, not contradictory.

Classical Landscape with Figures Drinking by a Fountain, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1806, is an iconic example of French Neoclassical landscape painting. Every element of the painting—light, shadows, color, trees, rocks, architecture, mountains, water, figures, even the arrangement of the billowing clouds—contributes to the pre-conceived harmony of the composition.