Paysage d’Italie avec trois chevaliers

Three horsemen ride toward a stream in this Italian landscape. The steep site is in the environs of Frascati in the Latium: the foreground of pines and cypresses belongs to the park of the Villa Rufinella, and on the right one can make out what may be the Villa Mondragone, while in the distance the Alban hills are rendered by the device of atmospheric perspective. Pierre-Athanase Chauvin, pupil of the great Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and his successor as professor of landscape at the École des Beaux-Arts, painted the view in 1806 — the catalogue’s first Chauvin and a pure example of the heroic-classical landscape of the Valenciennes school. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.