A horseman and animals before the temple of Venus and Roma, Rome

Director of the Académie de France in Rome in the mid-eighteenth century, Charles-Joseph Natoire developed his taste for landscape painting during his first stay in Rome as a student at the Academy in the 1720s. Despite the artist’s later dating of the present sheet, Natoire scholars Susanna Caviglia-Brunel and François Wedrychowski date it to the artist’s first stay in Rome. He drew in the Roman countryside for his own pleasure but also to encourage the students of the Palazzo Mancini to go on expeditions, which Hubert Robert and Fragonard did in abundance. (J.-H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, exh. cat., Rome, Villa Medici, 1991, p. 20, ills. 2 and 3.). Like this drawing, most of his Roman landscapes are on blue paper (Caviglia-Brunel, op. cit., nos. D.614-673).

This drawing depicts the ruins of the huge ancient Roman Temple of Venus and Roma. Situated at the eastern end of the Forum, between the Basilica of Maxentius and the Colosseum, the Temple of Venus and Roma was one of the largest buildings in Ancient Rome.

The present sheet may be identified with a drawing depicting ‘les restes du Temple du Soleil & de la Lune’; one of a group of almost 170 landscape drawings by Natoire acquired en bloc, for a total of 7,030 livres, by the painter and art dealer Augustin Ménageot (c.1700-1784) at the posthumous sale of the contents of the artist’s studio in 1778 (see provenance).