Paysage d’Italie

A wooded landscape, no doubt inspired by the environs of Rome, animated by figures dressed in antique costume, with hills in the distance evoking the Alban mountains. Jan Frans van Bloemen, known as L’Orizzonte for the luminous horizons of his views, settled in Rome in 1689 and spent his long career painting the Campagna in the classical manner of Claude Lorrain — the golden distance, the framing trees, the small staffage of shepherds and travellers. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.