Grégoire Isidore FLACHERON (1806-1873). - Lot 102

Grégoire Isidore FLACHERON (1806-1873). The Rome Campaign, 1845. Oil on canvas. Signed, located and dated lower right. 81 x 122 cm. Minor accidents. Grégoire Isidore Flachéron grew up in Lyon, where he began his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1824, joining Révoil's painting class in 1827. In 1833, he moved to Rome, where he remained until 1845. In 1841, he received his first medal at the Paris Salon for Cain after the Murder of Abel (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Although his taste for southern lights took him away from Lyon, Lyonnais critics continued to follow his work, examining the various works he sent to the Parisian and Lyonnais salons, praising the accuracy of his drawing and composition, the beauty of his warm tones and his rendering of atmosphere. In 1845, when our painting was completed, Isidore Flachéron was still in Italy. Our painting is a skilful recomposition of an ideal landscape imbued with the myth of Arcadia, and for which the Roman countryside offered a perfect model: "The hillsides are cut into terraces [...] A particular vapor, spread in the distance, rounds off the objects and conceals what they might have of hard or jagged form." (Chateaubriand, Lettre sur la campagne romaine, 1804 quoted in Paysage et littérature au XIXème siècle, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Flachéron's studies of the Roman countryside are fictionalized and idealized: architecture, vegetation and figures are placed in such a way as to guide the eye skilfully through the painting. Nevertheless, here Isidore Flachéron breaks away from the historical injunction usually at work in the classical French landscape school. Our painting asserts its subject: landscape and light. The painter no longer introduces historical, mythological or biblical references, and the figures depicted here are simple shepherds or water carriers. Flachéron aptly captures the muted atmosphere of a late summer's day. Light and shadow fall on the hillsides, structuring the composition through a subtle layering of planes. Perspective is created in the distance by the gradual gradation of tones: shades of green follow the brown ochres of the foreground, while the bluish palette opens the composition to the distance. The landscape is presented to us in a broad execution that gives space a new breadth and light an astonishing ardor. Related literature : - Paysagistes lyonnais 1800-1900, exhibition catalog, June-September 1984, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Palais Saint-Pierre, p.112-115.