.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Born in Aix-en-Provence the son of a stone mason, François-Marius Granet showed a precocious talent for drawing and, in the 1790s, became a pupil of Jean-Antoine Constantin, before joining the studio of Jacques-Louis David. In 1802, Granet departed for Rome, where he remained until 1824 as part of a thriving community of French artists, which counted among its members Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, François-Xavier Fabre, and Pierre-Athanase Chauvin. Following his return to France, he was elected to the Institut de France in 1830, and in 1833 was appointed curator of Louis-Philippe's newly-founded Musée Historique at Versailles.
Sketching from nature was central to Granet’s practice. Over the course of his career the artist produced a prodigious number of landscape studies, characterized by energetic brush strokes and a sensitive depiction of light. Yet, while his corpus of Italian oil studies is among the most extensive of any French landscape painter, his studies of the French countryside are rarer and tend to document forays into the Ile de France and the countryside around Aix undertaken after 1824. At the time of the 1997 sale in these rooms, however, Bernard Terlay dated this expansive composition much earlier to circa 1805. During this time, Granet is known to have visited his former master, Jean-Antoine Constantin, in Digne, at the edge of the Alpine foothills, and a drawing survives by Constantin of the same view (fig. 1).
Sketching from nature was central to Granet’s practice. Over the course of his career the artist produced a prodigious number of landscape studies, characterized by energetic brush strokes and a sensitive depiction of light. Yet, while his corpus of Italian oil studies is among the most extensive of any French landscape painter, his studies of the French countryside are rarer and tend to document forays into the Ile de France and the countryside around Aix undertaken after 1824. At the time of the 1997 sale in these rooms, however, Bernard Terlay dated this expansive composition much earlier to circa 1805. During this time, Granet is known to have visited his former master, Jean-Antoine Constantin, in Digne, at the edge of the Alpine foothills, and a drawing survives by Constantin of the same view (fig. 1).