Home Online catalogues True to Nature. Open-air Painting 1780-1870 75. Achille-Etna Michallon Paris 1796 – 1822 Paris View of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco, 1818 As the pupil of Valenciennes and teacher of Corot, Michallon is a crucial link in the story of plein air painting, despite his untimely death at the age of twenty-five. In 1817, he won the inaugural Prix de Rome for historical landscape and lived in Rome for three years between 1818-21. In the summer of 1818, the artist spent a month in Subiaco, a small town in the region of Lazio, where he painted no less than five studies of the Santa Scolastica, an awe-inspiring Benedictine monastery carved into a mountain above the Aniene river. With an assured hand, the artist renders the raggedness of the rocks with fluid brushwork, heavy impasto and a stark contrast of light and dark. Several drawings of the monastery buildings are preserved in the Louvre, and may have been used by the artist to refine this detail later in the studio.
As the pupil of Valenciennes and teacher of Corot, Michallon is a crucial link in the story of plein air painting, despite his untimely death at the age of twenty-five. In 1817, he won the inaugural Prix de Rome for historical landscape and lived in Rome for three years between 1818-21. In the summer of 1818, the artist spent a month in Subiaco, a small town in the region of Lazio, where he painted no less than five studies of the Santa Scolastica, an awe-inspiring Benedictine monastery carved into a mountain above the Aniene river. With an assured hand, the artist renders the raggedness of the rocks with fluid brushwork, heavy impasto and a stark contrast of light and dark. Several drawings of the monastery buildings are preserved in the Louvre, and may have been used by the artist to refine this detail later in the studio.