François-Marius Granet

The artist’s estate, with the paraphe of Granet’s co-executor, Jean-François Legendre-Héral and his numbering: 136;

Private collection;

sale, Paris, Ader Picart & Tajan, 1999 (as Benouville), according to Fiertag,

with Neal Fiertag, Paris, 2000,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 80 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2012-2013, no. 82

François-Marius Granet was a pupil of Jean-Antoine Constantin (1756-1844) and he also trained for a brief period in the studio of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). In 1802 he travelled to Rome where he lived for nearly thirty years, carving out a successful artistic career which, among other commissions, included selling views of Rome to local collectors and foreign tourists alike. On his return to France in 1830 he assumed a post as a curator at the Musée du Louvre and subsequently, some three years later, was appointed as the first curator of the Musée Historique, Versailles.

The present watercolor belongs to a small group of sheets executed during the artist’s time in Rome, when he first began to experiment with the medium. The site depicted has been tentatively identified as a view of the Monte Cavo from Frascati. A significantly later drawing¹ by the British artist Gilbert Ledward (1888-1960) annotated by the artist with the location – Monte Cavo from Frascati – illustrates clearly the compelling topographical similarities of the mountain on the horizon of the Nixon drawing. Granet was also known to make regular trips through the castelli romani and a comparable sheet to the present lot, of identical dimensions, can be found in the Musée Granet depicting a Vue des Quatre-Saints-Couronnés, de Saint Jean de Latran depuis les ruines des thermes de Titus.²

Curiously the attribution of this beautifully preserved watercolor seems to have previously been lost, as it bears an old attribution to Benouville, probably Jean-Achille Benouville (1815-1891), in the lower left corner. There is a certain irony, therefore, that this erroneous attribution should sit alongside the wiry paraph of Jean-François Legendre-Héral (1796-1851) who was the co-executor of Granet’s will and who applied his paraphe to the drawings in Granet’s studio at the time of the artist’s death.³

^1.London, Royal Academy, inv. no. 10/3707

^2.See D. Coutagne, François-Marius Granet, 1775-1849 une vie pour la peinture, exhib. cat., Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet, 2008, p. 154, n. 130, reproduced fig. 130

^3.Denis Coutagne, previous director of the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, affirmed the attribution of the Nixon drawing to Granet and the authenticity of the inscriptions in a written correspondence of 24 September 2004.