An extensive Italianate landscape at sunset, with a peasant family by a hut

Simon Denis trained in his native Antwerp under the landscape and animal painter Henri Antonissen (1737-1794). He left for Paris in around 1775, where he found a patron in the dealer Jean-Baptiste Lebrun. It was Lebrun who funded Denis' trip to Rome in 1786, where he was well received at the Académie de France. Denis was to spend the rest of his life in Italy and it was here that he began to paint sketches in oil en plein air, as prepartory works for large scale 'finished' canvases that he completed in the studio. The present work is an example of such an historical landscape in the tradition of Claude and Poussin, painted in 1811, in Naples where he had settled since 1804. Here he enjoyed considerable success, being appointed court painter to Joseph Bonaparte, after the death of Jacob Philipp Hackert in 1807.