A Roman village with a temple and tower at left

This landscape - more likely a capriccio than a precise view - was executed by David while he was a ‘pensionnaire’ at the Académie de France in Rome from 1775 to 1780. There David absorbed and recorded everything he saw in hundreds of drawings. He made copies after the Antique and Old Masters, and he studied the architecture and landscape of Rome and its surroundings. After his return to France he assembled these sheets into two albums organized thematically which his sons, Eugène and Jules (their paraphs on the present drawing), later divided into twelve parts. The present sheet comes from the tenth album, which remained with David’s heirs until the New York dealer Germain Seligman purchased it in the 1950s. At some point this album was unbound and its contents dispersed. But thanks to photographs of the album prior to its dismemberment, we know that the present drawing was on the 17th folio along with three other landscapes, today all in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., nos. 1080-82).