Les Cascatelles de Tivoli

Joseph Vernet spent twenty years in Italy, from 1734 to 1753, heir to the great landscapists of the preceding generations but formed above all at the school of nature — he multiplied drawing sessions from the motif on the coast and in the hills around Rome, and his contemporaries marvelled at the realism with which he rendered the riches of nature. Here the Cascatelle of Tivoli tumble past the Temple of the Sibyl in a broad panorama of rocks, water and luminous sky, the antique ruins and tiny figures setting the scale of the sublime site. Painted between 1740 and 1748, it is the catalog’s first Vernet. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.