Hunting in the Pontine Marshes
Hunting in the Pontine Marshes c1833 by French Painter Horace Vernet (Émile Jean-Horace Vernet 1789 – 1863); known for his Portraits, Orientalist and Battlefield scenes.
This is a dramatic and beautiful landscape scene of two men, one a guide rowing the boat, the other a hunter with a rifle taking aim from inside the boot, with his trusted dog by his side.
The two men are hunting a duck in a lush and colorful landscape of tall trees and high grasses as they pass underneath fallen tree that is bare of its bark and shines white in the daylight.
This is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image that is available for purchase as a rolled canvas print online.
Info Below Derived From NGA.gov and Wikipedia.org
Horace came from a long line of artist; he was born to French Painter Carle Vernet (Antoine Charles Horace Vernet 1758 – 1836), who was the youngest child of French Painter Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714 – 1789); France’s foremost painter of land- and seascapes.
On his mothers side of the family he was the grandson of the French engraver Jean Moreau le Jeune (1741 – 1814); and he was casually trained by his father, who was a chronicler of the elegancies of the post-Revolutionary decades and the empire.
Horace was a child prodigy and in his teens was considered a professional artist; and in 1811 opened his own studio producing artwork in fashion design, caricatures, portraits, horses in the manner of his father, and landscapes in the manner of his grandfather.
From 1821 to 1826 he painted a series of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars battles scenes Jemmapes, Montmirail, Hanau, and Valmy, painted for the duc d’Orléans, which gave a foretaste of that type of artwork he would later specialize in.
Though he had a disdain for the Bourbon government that was in power at the time and flaunted his distaste of it; he discretely mad conciliatory gestures to the government that were received well by the government and in short order, he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1825, a member of the Institute in 1826; and after successful showings at the Salons of 1826 and 1827, was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome 1829.
He held this position for seven years and during this time produced “The Brigand’s Confession”, oriental subjects “The Arab Story-teller”, and historical anecdotes “Encounter of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican”.
Then during the revolution of July 1830 which placed his patron Louis-Philippe on the throne; he was able to receive a vast number of opportunities of official state commissions for battle pieces; Four very large canvases for the Galerie des Batailles at Versailles, shown at the Salon of 1836, were followed by a second series in 1841.
Horace approach to creating his battle scene artwork was of that of a reporter of an eyewitness account at the actual theaters of war; so in five long visits to North Africa in 1833, 1837, 1839-40, 1845 and 1853 he gathered on the spot documentation of the French conquest on Algiers and Marocco, that he would later turn in to wall sized convases destined for Versailles.
In 1855 Horace exhibited twenty four paintings at the Universal Exposition, which his popular and official success.
