River Landscape

1700 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

landscape

In the last decades of the seventeenth century the ideal landscape of Claude Lorrain was continued by painters such as Étienne Allegrain and Pierre-Antoine Patel (Patel the Younger) who added to it a new type of artificiality which was almost eighteenth-century in character. But one artist, Alexandre-François Desportes, breaks entirely new ground. He spent the years 1695-96 at the Court of Poland as a portrait painter.

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About the Artist

Alexandre-François Desportes

1661 – 1743

French painter of dogs, game, and emblems of the chase. In his early career he worked much as a portraitist, notably in 1695-96 at the court of Jan Sobieski (John III) in Poland, but on his return to France he took up hunting subjects and won the patronage of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He achieved considerable celebrity (he was well received on a visit to England in 1712) and in his field was rivaled only by Oudry. Although he continued the lavish Flemish tradition exemplified by Snyders, Desportes was among the first artists of the 18 th century to make landscape studies from nature for his backgrounds, and because of this he was considered eccentric. His work is well represented in the Louvre (which has his self-portrait as a Huntsman, 1699) and in the Wallace Collection, London.

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