Women Bathing in a Mountain Landscape by Simon Denis

This Flemish artist was one of the first painters to practise plein air painting. Trained by the Antwerp landscape and animal painter Hendrik Joseph Antonissen, who taught him to observe nature closely, the young Flemish artist then travelled to Paris around 1775, where he produced relatively classical pastoral landscapes. There he was supported by the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, husband of the famous painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Thanks to him, in 1786, he travelled to Italy and settled in Rome until 1801–1803. Lebrun was one of the greatest patrons of landscape and genre painters of the 1780s generation. He exhibited their works at his ‘Salon pour l’Encouragement des Arts’ from 1790 to 1792, a unique forum for artistic exchange and also for the dissemination of the Dutch-inspired aesthetic

Settling in Naples, where he remained until the end of his life, he was appointed Court Painter for Views and Landscapes in 1807 by Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, and received an annuity and titles of nobility. A key figure in the Roman art scene, he associated mainly with French painters, but also with a few Nordic artists.

Simon Denis quickly became highly regarded for his small, atmospheric works, painted en plein air with a very free technique, in the spirit of Valenciennes, whom he may have met briefly in Paris. One of the first to practise plein air painting, the artist produced a considerable number of oil studies, numbered and categorised according to their subject matter: water, skies, vegetation, rocks, panoramas – so that he could draw on certain elements for the composition of his monumental neoclassical views of the Italian landscape.

The traditional use of trees as a backdrop probably inspired this foreground, which highlights the foliage tinged with gold by the sunlight, standing out against a slightly blurred grey-blue background, which is revealed to be a mountainous valley by glimpses of blue sky. More unusually, Denis introduces a picturesque element with the presence of women bathing.

Carole Blumenfeld and Etienne Bréton, ‘Paris, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Antwerp, 1797–1811. Letters from Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun to Simon Denis’, *Techné*, no. 33, 2011, pp. 18–32.

Valentina Branchini,Simon Denis (1755–1813) in Italy: Landscape Paintings and Drawings, edited by Anna Ottani Cavina, University of Bologna, 2003.