Roman countryside, attributed to Nicolas-Didier Boguet (1755-1839)

Nicolas-Didier Boguet (1755-1839) attributed. Lively landscape in the Roman countryside around 1800.

Canvas measuring 74 cm by 58 cm.
Antique frame measuring 89 cm by 72 cm.

Our painting was probably painted in the Lake Albano region. The artist would have set up his easel north of Frascati and looked south. At the center of the composition is the Frascati bridge (which another painter, Giovanni Battista Busirini (1698-1757) depicted from south to north this time in his "Frascati perspective"). In the background, Lake Albano is barely visible, and to finish the perspective, the Laziale volcano mountain. The nature is rich and peaceful, animated by a few walkers and a flock of sheep, a pastoral note essential to this bucolic evocation. Here and there, other barely perceptible characters.

Nicolas-Didier Boguet (1755-1839)

Trained in Parisian academic circles, he achieved a great reputation as a painter of battles, but his views of nature made him one of the main French representatives of the Italianate landscape tradition in the 18th century. Classically inspired, this genre took up the models developed in Rome by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin a century earlier, but unlike them, he was inspired by real landscapes. He studied for 6 years at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from 1778, he was 23 years old. Five years later, in 1783, his protector (the Prince of Condé) entrusted him to the care of Cardinal de Bernis, Louis XVI's ambassador to Pius VI. Having left for Italy with the intention of spending six months there, the young painter traveled around Rome and the surrounding area, painting, drawing, and discovering the great masters in churches and museums. He began to focus on landscape painting and, from then on, spent his summers traveling and painting in the Italian countryside, producing hundreds of paintings. He no longer considered leaving Italy, where he lived until his death. However, he participated in the Paris salons, particularly by exhibiting his battle scenes.