A cloud study over a Roman town

Following his initial training in his native city of Antwerp, Simon Denis moved to Paris in the early 1780s where he gained the patronage of the genre painter and dealer, Jean-Baptiste Lebrun. With Lebrun's support, Denis traveled to Rome in 1786 and soon established himself there. His reputation continued to grow through the 1790s and into the opening years of the new century, prior to his departure for Naples in 1806, where he took up his appointment as court painter to Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples.

In this evocative oil sketch, Denis seems to have been particularly interested in capturing the play of light and color through the sky as the sun tries to break through the clouds. He adopts a formula employed by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), whom he may have met in Paris between 1784-86, in anchoring his predominantly aerial study with a much smaller strip of landscape below. As found on almost all of Denis’s sketches, the verso of the paper is inscribed with a number; in this case '43.' It has been suggested that these numbers were probably not inscribed by the artist himself, but instead added later by one of his heirs and may therefore reflect a chronological sequence. The highest known number is ‘160’ and would, therefore, imply a relatively early date for the present sketch (M. Brady, Old Master and 19th-century Drawings 1480-1880, New York, 2023, no. 16).