Home Online catalogues True to Nature. Open-air Painting 1780-1870 4. Jules Coignet Paris 1798 – 1860 Paris View of Bozen with a Painter, 1837 Another pupil of Jean-Victor Bertin, Jules Coignet was an indefatigable traveller, and painted a large number of landscape oil sketches in France, Switzerland, Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor and above all Italy. This view painted in the South-Tyrol is both an open-air study and a document of the practice. Dressed in an indigo painter’s smock and straw sun hat, a pleinairiste sits on a three-legged folding stool with his paint box directly on his lap, probably working on a sheet of paper pinned to the inside of the lid. The parasol provides shade for the artist, but crucially also diffuses the light on the painting’s surface and reduces the glare of the oil paint in the sun. Set up just a few metres behind his fellow traveller, Coignet would have been using similar paraphernalia. He paid great attention to the topography of the site, carefully capturing the fall of light on the purplish mountains. According to his biographer, “he believed he only had the right to paint what he had seen and studied.”1 Evidently satisfied with this sketch, the artist scratched the location and date into the still-wet paint, thereby announcing that the picture was indeed executed entirely en plein air. 1“il ne se croyait le droit de peindre que ce qu’il avait vu et étudié”, cited by Vincent Pomarède, in exh. cat. Paysages d’Italie - les peintres du plein air (1780-1830), Paris/Mantoue, 2001, p. 169.
Another pupil of Jean-Victor Bertin, Jules Coignet was an indefatigable traveller, and painted a large number of landscape oil sketches in France, Switzerland, Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor and above all Italy. This view painted in the South-Tyrol is both an open-air study and a document of the practice. Dressed in an indigo painter’s smock and straw sun hat, a pleinairiste sits on a three-legged folding stool with his paint box directly on his lap, probably working on a sheet of paper pinned to the inside of the lid. The parasol provides shade for the artist, but crucially also diffuses the light on the painting’s surface and reduces the glare of the oil paint in the sun. Set up just a few metres behind his fellow traveller, Coignet would have been using similar paraphernalia. He paid great attention to the topography of the site, carefully capturing the fall of light on the purplish mountains. According to his biographer, “he believed he only had the right to paint what he had seen and studied.”1 Evidently satisfied with this sketch, the artist scratched the location and date into the still-wet paint, thereby announcing that the picture was indeed executed entirely en plein air. 1“il ne se croyait le droit de peindre que ce qu’il avait vu et étudié”, cited by Vincent Pomarède, in exh. cat. Paysages d’Italie - les peintres du plein air (1780-1830), Paris/Mantoue, 2001, p. 169.