A wooded landscape with a gully; and A river landscape with travellers on a bridge

Nicolas-Charles was the grandson of Israel Silvestre. According to Pierre-Jean Mariette he was a distinguished amateur, joining the Academy in 1747 as a landscape painter. In 1717 he was appointed the drawing master to the young King Louis XV and in 1738 to the royal children. In 1984 the Louvre acquired an album of 128 drawings by the Silvestre family, 72 of which are by Charles-Nicolas, M.-T. Gugot, Acquisitions 1984-9, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1990, nos. 102-3. Other drawings by Silvestre were in the Woodner Collection, sold in these Rooms, 2 July 1991, lot 148, and in the Emile Wolf Collection, K. Oberhuber and B. Schreiber Jacoby, French Drawings from a Private Collection: Louis XIII to Louis XVI, exhib. cat., Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, 1980, no. 32.