Home Online catalogues True to Nature. Open-air Painting 1780-1870 41. Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont Versailles 1790 – 1870 Paris Grotto in a Rocky Landscape Sarazin de Belmont first travelled to Italy in 1824, staying for two years, and returned in 1841, painting up and down the peninsula for over two decades. She funded her lifestyle as a travelling artist by organising solo auctions of her works, held in Paris in 1829, 1839, and 1859 – the first female artist to do so. Rather unusually for early plein air painters, Sarazin de Belmont sold both her finished paintings and her landscape oil studies, though these were likely embellished somewhat in the studio. This seems to be the case with this view painted from the inside of a grotto. It was probably begun on the spot with some finishing touches, such as the delicate, dangling weeds, added later. The scale of the paper and the viewpoint chosen by the artist completely immerse the viewer within the grotto, whose rocky interior and surrounding verdant hills successively frame the vista onto the distant mountains. The meticulously rendered light effects and the use of atmospheric perspective – the subtle diminishing of clarity and colour from the foreground to the background of the landscape – reveal her neoclassical training under Valenciennes and the influence of Claude.
Sarazin de Belmont first travelled to Italy in 1824, staying for two years, and returned in 1841, painting up and down the peninsula for over two decades. She funded her lifestyle as a travelling artist by organising solo auctions of her works, held in Paris in 1829, 1839, and 1859 – the first female artist to do so. Rather unusually for early plein air painters, Sarazin de Belmont sold both her finished paintings and her landscape oil studies, though these were likely embellished somewhat in the studio. This seems to be the case with this view painted from the inside of a grotto. It was probably begun on the spot with some finishing touches, such as the delicate, dangling weeds, added later. The scale of the paper and the viewpoint chosen by the artist completely immerse the viewer within the grotto, whose rocky interior and surrounding verdant hills successively frame the vista onto the distant mountains. The meticulously rendered light effects and the use of atmospheric perspective – the subtle diminishing of clarity and colour from the foreground to the background of the landscape – reveal her neoclassical training under Valenciennes and the influence of Claude.