An idyllic landscape by Étienne Allegrain

An inscription on the reverse of this small painting mentions the name of Etienne Allegrain, which is entirely consistent with the artist’s output, as demonstrated by paintings that have appeared at public auctions, particularly in this small format, which is similar to a print (Karl & Faber auction, Munich, 13 November 2015 and the Aguttes auction, Neuilly, 16 June 2003).

ÉtienneAllegrain(1645–1736) was a French painter and engraver, regarded as one of the finest landscape painters of the^17th century, who was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1677. The art collector Roger de Piles, who was highly influential at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and a contemporary of Allegrain, held these intellectualised landscapes in high regard; Nicolas Poussin—a painter much admired in Paris despite practising in Italy—had perfected this style.

The landscape genre began to diversify in France towards the end of the^17th century, spurred by the demand for decorative topographical views of Versailles and its gardens. At the Grand Trianon, the painters Jean-Baptiste Martin (1659–1735), Pierre-Denis Martin (1663–1742), Jean Cotelle (1642–1708) and Étienne Allegrain (1644–1736). At the same time, the taste for classical landscape painting, inherited from Nicolas Poussin, remained undiminished amongst art lovers. Étienne Allegrain also met this demand by producing works intended for the art-loving public, in medium and small formats, as did Francisque Millet (1642–1679), with whom he is often confused. Étienne Allegrain interpreted and popularised in France the ‘heroic landscape’ of Nicolas Poussin—with whom he was often compared by his contemporaries—by creating additional decorative effects using sinuous trees with dense foliage, broken trunks, architectural features, ancient ruins and female figures, foreshadowing the inspiration of the prolific painter of imaginary landscapes, Hubert Robert.

The distinctive feature of Aulteribe’s painting lies in its effects of light, enhanced by a powerful chromatic contrast between a very luminous blue horizon—probably rendered using a lapis lazuli glaze—piercing through the shadow of the foliage in the foreground. The foliage itself is rendered with great subtlety, varying through different shades of green. This very small painting appeals more to visual and sensory emotion than to the intellect, although the two pairs of figures are not without echoes of the tradition of ‘conversation pieces’ set in natural surroundings. Étienne Allegrain’s art occupies a transitional period between the intellectualisation of the experience of nature and its reception as a purely sensory moment, a trend that flourished from the late^18th century onwards and continued throughout the^19th century. This small format is undoubtedly far from unique in the artist’s output, and may well have been intended for sale in pairs. A pair of landscapes comparable to our painting did in fact come up for public auction (Aguttes auction, Neuilly, 16 June 2003). The chromatic effect is very different, as it features autumnal colours, but the small format follows the same decorative principle.

A.-J. Dezallier d’Argenville, *Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres*(A Brief Account of the Lives of the Most Famous Painters), Paris, 1762, vol. IV, pp. 185–188.

Anne Lossel-Guillien, ‘In Search of the Work of Étienne Allegrain, Landscape Painter of the Late Reign of Louis XIV’, *Histoire de l’art*, No. 4, 1988, pp. 69–78.

Pierre Rosenberg (ed.), *Nicolas Poussin and His Time: French and Italian Classicism Contemporary with Poussin*, Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, April–May 1961, Paris, 1961.