Claude-Joseph Vernet (Avignon 1714-1789 Paris)
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Claude-Joseph Vernet (Avignon 1714-1789 Paris)

A Mediterranean coastal landscape with elegant company disembarking from an Italian Gondola

Details
Claude-Joseph Vernet (Avignon 1714-1789 Paris)
A Mediterranean coastal landscape with elegant company disembarking from an Italian Gondola
oil on canvas
26 3/8 x 38 5/8 in. (67 x 98 cm.)
Provenance
Massey-Mainwairing; Christie's, London, 10 April 1907, lot 599.
A. Belvallette, Paris.
Rodolphe Darblay, Paris and by descent to the vendor.
Literature
F. Ingersoll-Smouse, Joseph Vernet, Paris, 1926, II, no. 1025.
Exhibited
Copenhagen, L'art français au XVIIIème siècle, 1935.
Paris, Chef-d'oeuvres de l'art français, 1937, p. 29, no. 111.
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Landscape in French Art, 1949-1950, p. 35, no. 127, as signed and dated 1778.
Special notice
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Born in Avignon, Vernet went to Rome at the age of twenty to become a history painter. He soon took to landscape painting after discovering the art of Claude Gellée, Salvator Rosa and Andrea Locatelli, and decided to join the studio of Adrien Manglard, a successful French marine painter. He travelled to Naples in 1737 and on many other occasions. By 1740, Vernet had established a reputation as a painter of marines, and French diplomats as well as English Grand Tourists were to be among Vernet's most consistent patrons, the latter no doubt encouraged by Vernet's English wife, Virgina Cecilia Parker, the daughter of a captain in the papal navy, whom he married in 1745.

Official recognition in his own country began when he was approved by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1746, which enabled him to exhibit at the Salon that year for the first time. When Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, later marquis de Marigny and Directeur des Bâtiments, made his educational tour of Italy in 1750, he and his party visited Vernet's studio in Rome. It was on the marquis' initiative that, in 1753, Vernet was summoned back to France to paint the Ports de France, one of the most important royal commissions of Louis XV's reign. He continued working on this commission until 1765. He continued in his later years to repeat the themes of his earlier career.

The inclusion of the so-called Italian Gondola was clearly popular with Vernet's patrons: other coastal scenes by the artist where this type of boat is also depicted are in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, the Prado, Madrid and the Musée Calvet, Avignon.

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