Romain-Etienne-Gabriel Prieur
(1806 - Paris - 1879)
Remains of the Roman Aqueduct at the Forum Julii in Fréjus, Southern France
c.1835/45
Signed lower right G. Prieur
Oil on millboard
28 x 40.3 cm
SOLD
Born into a family of artisans in La Ferté-Gaucher to the east of Paris, Gabriel Prieur was a pupil of the landscape painter Jean-Victor Bertin (1792-1842) and won the Prix de Rome in paysage historique in 1833 with Ulysse et Nausicaa. A growing interest in landscape painting in early nineteenth-century France, espoused by artists such as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), Achille-Etna Michallon (1796-1822) and Bertin himself, resulted in the creation in 1817 of an historical landscape category in the annual Prix de Rome contest. The Grand Prix winner was entitled to study in Rome for four years, living as a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici.
Prieur's time in Rome was cut short by the ill health of his wife, Adèle, who had stayed in Paris, and he was forced to return to Paris in 1835. While in Rome, however, he followed the advice of his teacher Bertin and took up the habit of executing landscape studies en plein-air.
The present oil sketch, executed after his return to France, belongs to these studies and is typical of Prieur and other French landscape painters working in Italy and France at this time in its interest in depicting classical ruins, its ease and freshness of execution, its Mediterranean light and its bold composition. It is the landscape itself, and the play of light and colour within the landscape, not nature as a backdrop to historical subject, which is the focus here.
In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar decided to have the Adrian Way built to link Italy through to Spain. In those days the Phoenicians of Marseille had already set up a colony on the site of today's Fréjus, but it was the Roman emperor who gave the port its prosperity and its name of 'Forum Julii' meaning 'market of Julius'. The remains of the aqueduct depicted by Prieur are still in place today.
Prieur exhibited at the Paris Salons from 1830 to 1875. Due to his wife's fragile health and his inability to leave her for very long he never returned to Italy and occasions for more extensive travelling to Southern France and Switzerland were rare. Most of his views feature the environs of Paris such as Versailles, Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
This quick study, not entirely finished, and the others which he painted in France and in Rome in the mid-1830s remained in his studio, serving as inspiration for elements in larger, finished paintings for the rest of his career. In fact, he exhibited a painting with the same title, Ruines d'aqueducs romains, à Fréjus at the Salon of 1870.