View of Bozen with a Painter

1837

Jules Coignet

Painter, French, 1798 - 1860

Perched on a rocky outcropping in the lower left corner of this landscape, a person sits with their back to us with a canvas near their knees, facing a moss-green, craggy mountain that fills most of our view this horizontal scene. The person wears a floppy-brimmed, straw-yellow hat and a teal-blue smock. He has cream-white pants and black shoes, and sits on a three-legged stool. A canvas rests on or just beyond his knees, and he holds one hand up to its blank surface. A tall, parchment-white umbrella is pitched next to him, to our right, to provide some shade. A few swipes of brick red, brown, and pinkish beige next to him could be bags or other materials leaning against a rock. He sits in the curve of the rocky outcropping, which is painted with dabs and swirls of olive green, butter yellow, and ginger brown. A valley stretches out between the painter and the mountain. Meadows in the valley are painted with pale sage green, and a cluster of tan buildings sits near the edge of an ice-blue body of water. The hill rises steeply from the valley. It dips a bit to our left and comes more than three-quarters up the composition to our right. It is painted in hazy, muted tones of moss green, mauve purple, and smoke gray. The sky deepens from pale lemon yellow along the horizon through light peach to muted blue along the top edge. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower left corner, “Botzen. 1837.”

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 91


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Art market, France;[1] (Galerie Fischer-Kiener, Paris); sold November 1991 to Mrs. John Jay Ide, San Francisco; gift 1994 to NGA.
[1] See letter dated 28 October 1999 from Jacques Fischer, in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2020

  • True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2020 - 2022, no. 2, repro.

Bibliography

2000

  • Eitner, Lorenz. French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2000: 17-18, color repro.

Inscriptions

lower left: Botzen. 1837

Wikidata ID

Q20186312


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