Lot 76: - Pierre Patel the Elder , Picardy circa 1605 - 1676 Paris A landscape at evening with travellers and a hunter near classical ruins oil on canvas, in a Louis XV carved and gilt wood frame

oil on canvas, in a Louis XV carved and gilt wood frame

measurements note 63.5 by 90 cm.; 25 by 35 1/2 in.

L'Estampille - L'Objet d'Art, March 1993, p. 30, reproduced;
N. Coural, Les Patel. Paysagistes du XVIIe siècle, Paris 2001, pp. 138-39, cat. no. PP9, reproduced.

Manon, Countess of Lovelace (d.1990);
Sold by her Executors, London, Christie's, 23 April 1993, lot 34, when acquired by the late owner.

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION FORMED BY THE LATE DR GUSTAV RAU
This idyllic classical landscape is one of Patel's greatest works. A few travellers walk or pause for rest in the shadow of the columns of a decayed classical temple. Just as the sun's last rays bathe the marshy landscape and its ancient ruins in a warm golden light, a single shot from a huntsman at the edge of the reeds rings out across the water. There is no breath of wind, and nothing can disturb the sense of utter stillness and tranquillity which permeates the scene, where all the colours and forms are rendered with an almost crystalline clarity. Natalie Coural dates this landscape to around 1640, and describes it as 'l'un des chefs-d'oeuvre de Pierre Patel' ('one of Patel's masterpieces'). It is without doubt the most important work from the first decade of Patel's career. In terms of style, Coural compares the Rau landscape to another Landscape with classical ruins now in Valence, Musée des Beaux-Arts,υ1 which she considers of a similar date, but suggests that the cool clear colours of the present work, together with its greater realism, would indicate that it was the earlier of the two pictures. By this date Patel had been in Paris barely six years, having been received into the Guild of St. Germain-des-Prés in 1633-34 and the Académie de Saint-Luc a year later. There is no evidence that Patel ever went to Italy, and though he may have known of the work of Claude Lorrain in Rome, his style at this date was more likely to have been influenced by the example of the latter's Dutch follower Herman van Swanevelt, who had returned from Italy to settle in Paris in the 1630s. Patel's clearer and more refined classicism is, however, typical of French landscape painting of the period, as practised for example by his contemporaries in Paris, Henri Mauperché or Laurent de la Hyre. In this early painting he has already begun to develop his distinct semi-arcadian vocabulary of marshland, classical ruins and delicate trees. The painting illustrates superbly the bright palette and sharpness of both technique and tone that mark his earlier paintings, as distinct from the more complex design or deeper colour that characterise his later work.υ2 Patel's talents were clearly recognised by his contemporaries, for he worked together with Simon Vouet in the 1630s, between 1646-47 with Eustache le Sueur at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, and between 1668 and 1676 the accounts of the Bâtiments du Roi also record a series of views of the Royal Palaces.υ3 The Abbé Fontenay praised his 'coloris vigoreux'υ4, while Pierre-Jean Mariette went as far as to describe him as 'the Claude Lorrain of France', favourably comparing his 'fraicheur' and the surety of his touch.υ5 Although Patel undoubtedly worked in the long shadow cast by his distant and more famous compatriot in Rome, he was not a mere slavish imitator of Claude, and his best work retains a degree of independence and a poetic quality that was unmatched by any of his contemporaries in France itself. 1. Inv. no. P. 578; see N. Coural, under Literature, p. 141, no. 12, reproduced.
2. For an outstanding example of this later period, see, for example, the work of the 1660s sold in these Rooms, 10 July 2003, lot 53 (£220,000).
3. Of these only that of 1668 of the Palace at Versailles survives, where it remains in situ.
4. Dictionnaire des artistes, Paris 1776, vol. II, p. 269.
5. Abecedario, 1750-54, Paris 1857-58, vol. IV, pp.88-89.