Claude Joseph Vernet, Seaport with Antique Ruins: Morning, 1751

Claude Joseph Vernet painted this pair of pictures (cats. 332 and 333) in Rome just as he was achieving international fame as a landscape and marine painter. They exemplify his innovative approach to the Italian tradition of idealized landscape, combining the particulars of nature and allusions to antiquity within pleasing, harmonious compositions. Vernet frequently produced dramatic, stormy landscapes and marine paintings with shipwrecks, but here he depicted nature at its most calm and beautiful, evoking the pleasures of Italy.

The scenery, with its fortified harbor and snowcapped mountains in the distance, calls to mind the coastline near Naples, a favorite motif for Vernet, although the geography is more fanciful than topographical. In Italy, these pictures would have been called capricci (caprices, i.e., imaginary scenes) rather than vedute (views, i.e., depictions of specific places). Indeed, the architectural ruins in both paintings, while reminiscent of antique structures Vernet had seen in Rome, are the artist’s inventions. Stephen Borys has noted that the arched monument in ruins at the left in Seaport is loosely based on the Ponte Rotto in Rome, the ruin of an ancient bridge crossing the Tiber that Vernet had painted in 1745 (Fig. 1), although here it spans the crest of a rocky outcropping much like an aqueduct.¹ The pyramidal temple in Coastal Harbor, meanwhile, recalls the Tomb of Gaius Cestius Gallus, known as the Pyramid of Cestius, which is also in Rome. Vernet integrated these elements of the landscape with eighteenth-century boats and numerous figures dressed in contemporaneous clothing to highlight the most appealing aspects of ancient and modern Italy.

For their first owner, Louis Gabriel Peilhon (1700–1762), the pictures served as appropriate souvenirs of his visits to Italy. Peilhon came from the artist’s hometown of Avignon and had risen to the rank of Conseiller-Secrétaire du Roi (royal counsellor-secretary) in Paris; he was therefore a personal friend as well as a well-placed government client.² He ordered the paintings in November 1750, and Vernet recorded the commission in his account book, noting that he would charge 1,200 francs for the pair. As was his habit, Vernet indicated the intended size of the paintings and their general subjects—“one depicting a warm and golden sunset, the other a morning scene, crisp and clear”—although the details specified there (“a landscape and a marine with waterfalls or rivers, figures and animals”)³ would change in the end. These were to be the sixth and seventh of twelve total canvases ordered from Vernet by Peilhon, who was happy, in most cases, to leave the particulars to the artist (Vernet wrote “two marines left to my imagination”⁴ in reference to a December 1748 commission).⁵ The canvases probably did not arrive in Paris until very late in 1751 at the earliest, for they were not included in the Salon exhibition at the Louvre that year, which opened on August 25 and remained on view for a month. Indeed, it is not certain when Peilhon took them into his possession, but it was certainly by late summer 1753, when he lent them to the Salon that year, along with three other Vernets from his collection.⁶

By that time Vernet had returned to Paris. He had lived in Rome since 1734, where he moved from Avignon under the sponsorship of Joseph de Seytres, marquis de Caumont (1688–1745). Vernet had been recalled to the French capital by the marquis de Marigny, Surintendant des Bâtiments (the king’s chief arts minister and the brother of Madame de Pompadour, the royal mistress), to take on a great commission: producing a suite of monumental canvases depicting the principal ports of France.⁷ This series of pictures, which eventually numbered fifteen, has been described as the most significant royal commission undertaken during the reign of Louis XV (r. 1715–74), an extraordinary fact given that landscape painting was still undervalued by the Salon and the Royal Academy.⁸ The commission is evidence of the high esteem in which Vernet was held, having established an international reputation as the leading landscape painter in Europe during his years in Rome.

The two Kansas City pictures, painted a few years before Vernet’s return to Paris, are smaller in scale and lack the documentary focus of the topographical works from the Ports de France series. Yet, like those compositions, they exhibit the vivid naturalism that had, by 1750, earned the painter considerable acclaim. Vernet frequently painted pairs of landscapes as contrasting pendants, or even in sets of four, so that they “act together and set each other off,” as he once put it.⁹ The contrast between the two Kansas City paintings is subtle, but even here—as Vernet wrote in his account book—he set out to juxtapose two times of day: morning in Seaport with Antique Ruins and evening in Coastal Harbor with a Pyramid. He correspondingly arranged the compositions so that Morning would logically hang to the left of Evening. The character of the landscape in the two scenes is similar enough so that we might almost believe they depict a single continuous panorama: the foreground quayside, the far bank, and the distant mountains line up more or less convincingly. Nevertheless, they should be understood as two separate views of comparable topography, distinguished primarily by the feeling of the “crisp, clear” morning air contrasted with the “warm and golden” light of evening.

Vernet arranged the forms carefully in each composition. The pair of spindly trees and the arched ruin at the left in Seaport balances the fuller massing of trees at the right in Coastal Harbor, with the effect of framing the two compositions; the tilt of the tree trunks mimics the tilt of the ships’ masts; and the raking light of morning and evening filters through the scenes, throwing long shadows and creating a pleasing rhythm of lights and darks. Vernet populated his scenes with a variety of bustling figures that lead our eye in and around the compositions and add to the pleasure we take in exploring the pictures with care. Only on second glance do certain details become apparent: the pilgrim with a staff kneeling in prayer before the statue of the Virgin Mary in Seaport (this little vignette evidently inspired the title of Jean Daullé’s 1760 reproductive engraving, The Pilgrimage [Fig. 2])¹⁰ and the dog drinking out of the fountain in the lower-right corner of Coastal Harbor, apparently upsetting the gesticulating laundress.

Vernet exhibited the two paintings at the Salon of 1753 at a key moment of his career. Although he had been participating in the biennial exhibitions since 1746, sending work from Rome, the year 1753 marked something of an official homecoming. He had returned to the capital to take on the commission to paint the Ports de France series, and it was likely that he saw this Salon as an opportunity to secure his reputation with the Parisian public. He exhibited twelve paintings, including his morceau de reception (the presentation picture that established his full membership in the Royal Academy), thus showing his full repertoire: landscapes, seascapes, stormy views and calm views, sunsets and sunrises.¹¹ His strategy worked for the most part, as his presence at the Salon of 1753 brought a great deal of positive notice from the critics, even if some pictures were admired more than others.¹² “So much talent and so little recognized,” decreed one critic. “I am reminded of this artist that we have seen for far too long triumphing on the banks of the Tiber, and that Paris now promises to see settled back in her bosom. . . . Unique in his genre, Vernet has left all those who came before him far behind.”¹³

In producing two “calm views,” Vernet was directly evoking the works of Claude Lorrain (1600–82), the seventeenth-century French painter of idealized Roman landscapes and glowing harbor scenes.¹⁴ This was not lost on observers at the Salon: “This able master,” wrote one, “has equaled the famous Claude Lorrain in his landscapes and marines by the freshness of his tones, the vividness of his colors, and the softness of his touch.”¹⁵ “Mr. Vernet,” wrote another, “is the equal of Claude in many aspects and definitely surpasses him in drawing.”¹⁶ When we compare the Kansas City pendants to a characteristic painting by Claude, such as An Artist Studying from Nature, 1639 (Fig. 3), we see just how indebted Vernet was to the earlier master. As was Claude’s habit, Vernet adopted a low point of view, massing the trees or architecture to the sides of the composition and focusing the center on a vista across a body of water to a distant, mountainous shore.¹⁷

Vernet brought to his landscapes a keen sense of observation and a naturalism that was greatly admired by critics and collectors in France. Even at his Salon debut in 1746, reformist critics, tired of the decorative confections of the rococo style (represented at the Nelson-Atkins by François Boucher’s Landscape with a Water Mill of 1740), identified Vernet as a painter who could offer an alternative approach, one grounded in the study of nature. “Vernet’s pictures engage our full attention by the force of truth and the charm of his imitation [of nature],” wrote Etienne La Font de Saint-Yenne in his review of the Salon of 1746.¹⁸ By the time the Salon of 1753 was held, Vernet could be considered the new touchstone for landscape. The influential connoisseur and academician Charles-Nicolas Cochin offered high praise: “I submit that the modern painter [Vernet] knows even better [than Claude] the varieties of nature, and he produces pictures more diverse in their beauties, that furthermore there is a spirited handling in all the details, that he fills them with figures that are well drawn and painted in a noble and generous manner.”¹⁹ In pictures such as Seaport with Antique Ruins: Morning and Coastal Harbor with a Pyramid: Evening, Vernet struck just this balance—between a beautifully harmonized composition and a convincing representation of the natural world—that would lead, ultimately, to the transformation of landscape painting in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Stephen D. Borys, The Splendor of Ruins in French Landscape Painting, 1630–1800, exh. cat. (Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 2005), 163–66. The actual name of the bridge was the Ponte Senatorio, but it was colloquially known as the Ponte Rotto (“Broken Bridge”).

2. Peilhon assembled a notable collection of Italian, Flemish, and French Old Masters as well as modern pictures; see Léon Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture au XVIIIème siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Didier, 1864), 53–54.

3. Vernet, “Commande 112,” Livres de raison (Musée Calvet, Avignon), quoted in Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture, 333: “[No.] 112. Pour M. Peilhon deux tableaux, de deux pieds huits pouces de large, sur deux pieds un pouce de haut devant reppresenter [sic] un soleil couchant, bien chaud et bien doré, et l’autre un matin bien frais, qu’il y aye [sic] du païsage et de la marine, avec des cascades ou des rivières, des figures et des animeaux [sic], ordonnez au mois de novembre 1750 le prix est douze cents francs les deux” (112. For Mr. Peilhon two paintings, two feet eight inches wide, by two feet one inch high, one depicting a warm and golden sunset, the other a morning scene, crisp and clear, a landscape and a marine, with waterfalls or rivers, figures and animals, ordered in November 1750, the price is twelve hundred francs for the pair).

4. “No. 79. Pour M. Peilhon deux marines à ma fantesie” (For Mr. Peilhon, two marines left to my imagination); Vernet, “Commande 79,” Livres de raison, quoted in Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture, 329.

5. Only eight paintings by Vernet appeared in the posthumous 1763 sale of Peilhon’s collection: Catalogue Raisonné des Tableaux du Cabinet de feu M. Peilhon, Secrétaire du Roi et Fermier Général (Paris: Didot, May 16, 1763), nos. 70–72, 81–82. The paintings now in Kansas City were catalogued together under no. 71, “Deux Tableaux du même Maître, peints en 1751, sur toile de deux pieds de haut, sur deux pieds sept poucs & demi de large. Ils représente[nt] des Vues de Mer, des Ruines, des Fabriques & du Paysage avec beaucoup de Figures. Le coloris en est bon, & la touche de ce beau Faire qui caractérise le Peintre Savant. L’un de ces deux Tableaux à été gravé par Jean Daullé, il a pour titre Le Pèlerinage” (Two paintings by the same master, painted in 1751, on canvas two feet high, two feet seven and a half inches wide. They represent views of the sea, ruins, factories and landscape with many figures. The coloring is good, and the touch of that fine craftsman which characterizes the learned painter. One of these two paintings was engraved by Jean Daullé, it is entitled The Pilgrimage).

6. [Abel-François Poisson] De Vandières, Explication des Peintures, Sculptures, et Autres Ouvrages de Messieurs de L’Academie Royale . . . . À commencer le jour de S. Loüis 25. d’Aoust [Août] 1753. pour durer jusqu’au 25. Septembre (Paris: J. J. E. Collombat, 1753), nos. 128–30. The Kansas City pair was recorded together under no. 129. It is possible that Vernet retained the pictures in his possession while in Rome, delivering them to Peilhon only upon his return to Paris in 1753, although he could have delivered them to Peilhon during trips made to Paris in 1751 and 1752. The Kansas City paintings do not appear in Vernet’s account book of payments received; of the six orders made by Peilhon (for a total of twelve paintings), Vernet recorded payments for four (for a total of eight paintings). See Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture, 359–63.

7. The best modern study of these paintings is Laurent Manœuvre and Eric Rieth, Joseph Vernet, 1714–1789: Les Ports de France (Arcueil, France: Editions Anthèse, 1994). In the summer of 1756, Vernet took a hiatus from his grueling work on the Ports, spending several months in his hometown of Avignon to work on another painting for Peilhon: a large panoramic view of the city as ambitious as any of the canvases for the Ports de France series; see “L13033,” Sotheby’s, London, July 3, 2013, lot 39, A View of Avignon, from the Right Bank of the Rhone near Villeneuve (signed and dated 1757, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 90 1/2 in.), https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/old-master-british-paintings-evening-l13033/lot.39.html.

8. Philip Conisbee, Claude Joseph Vernet 1714–1789, exh. cat. (London: Greater London Council, 1976), unpaginated.

9. Quoted in Conisbee, Claude Joseph Vernet, unpaginated.

10. Pierre Arlaud, Catalogue raisonné des estampes gravées d’après Joseph Vernet (Avignon: Rullière-Libeccio, 1976), 37.

11. Explication des Peintures, Sculptures. . . 1753, nos. 128–33. The morceau is no. 133, “Un Tableau . . . représentant une Marine, Païsage & Soleil couchant” (A painting . . . representing a seascape, landscape & setting sun); it is now called Marine—Effet de soleil couchant (Seascape—Sunset Effect) (Musée national du château de Fontainebleau, INV. 8309). Vernet’s stay in Paris would not last long, as the Ports de France project entailed traveling around the country, with his family in tow, for most of the decade; he did not settle definitively in Paris until 1762.

12. For example, one wrote, “Tous les Tableaux qu’il a donnés cette année, quoique très-beaux, ne sont pas de la même force, il y en a quelques-uns de négligés” (All the paintings he gave this year, although very beautiful, are not of the same strength, there are some neglected); [Pierre] Estève, Lettre à un Ami, Sur l’Exposition des Tableaux faite dans le grand Sallon du Louvre, le 25. Août 1753 [(1753–54)], Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Collection Deloynes, vol. 5, no. 56, p. 12.

13. “Me rappellent cet Artiste qu’on a vû trop long-temps triompher sur les bords du Tibre, & et que Paris desormais se promet de voir reposer dans son sein. . . .Vernet unique dans son genre, laisse bien loin derrière lui tous ceux qui l’on precede dan la même carrière”; [Anonymous], La Peinture: Ode de Milord Telliab (London, 1753), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Collection Deloynes, vol. 5, no. 57, p. 10.

14. Peilhon himself owned three paintings attributed to Claude; see Catalogue Raisonné des Tableaux du Cabinet de feu M. Peilhon, nos. 58 and 59.

15. “Cet habile Maître a égalé le fameux Claude Lorrain, dans ses Païsages & ses Marines par la fraîcheur de ses teintes, par la vivacité de son coloris, par la douceur de son pinceau”; Jacque Le Combe, Le Salon ([Paris], 1753), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Collection Deloynes, vol. 5, no. 55, p. 32.

16. “M. Vernet égale le Claude Lorrain en plusieurs parties, & certainement le surpasse en celle du dessin”; Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, Observations sur les Ouvrages de MM. de l’Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, Exposés au Sallon du Louvre, en l’Année 1753, Et sur quelques Ecrits qui ont rapport à la Peinture ([Paris], 1753), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Collection Deloynes, vol. 5, no. 63, p. 30.

17. See other examples of Claude Lorrain’s work with similar pictorial structure in this catalogue. Glynnis Napier Stevenson, “Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain, Mill on the Tiber, ca. 1650, and Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain, Landscape with a Piping Shepherd, 1667,” catalogue entry in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, forthcoming)."

18. “Attachent avidement nos regards dans les Tableaux de Sieur Vernet par la force de la vérité, & le charme de l’imitation”; [Etienne de La Font de Saint-Yenne], Réflexions sur Quelques Causes de l’État Présent de la Peinture en France (The Hague: Jean Neaulme, 1747), 101.

19. “J’ajouterai que le Peintre moderne connoît encore mieux les varietiés de la Nature, & qu’il produit des Tableaux plus différens dans leurs beautés; qu’il y a de plus une exécution pleine d’esprit dans tous les détails, & qu’il les orne de figures bien dessinées, & peintes d’une maniere grande & large”; [Charles Nicolas] Cochin, Lettre à un amateur, En réponse aux Critiques qui ont paru sur l’exposition des Tableaux (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1753), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection Deloynes, vol. 5, no. 61, p. 24.

Technical entry forthcoming.