Collection Online as of January 20, 2021
Capri
Jean Achille Benouville
(French, 1815-1891)
Oil on fabric
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund 1980.5
Location
not on view
Description
Located in the Mediterrean Sea, south of Rome, the island of Capri has been famous since Roman times for its spectacular scenery and mild climate. In the 19th century it became the home of many European nobles, and attracted artists from across the continent. Here Benouville captured the beauty of the island's rocky coastline, focusing his attention on a path leading toward the city of Capri and past the rocky outcropping of Monte Solaro.
Fascinated by the Italian landscape, Benouville spent years in Italy drawing and painting the countryside. From 1838 to 1845 he made at least three trips there, and in 1845, after winning the Prix de Rome-a fellowship allowing promising artists to study in that city-spent much of the next 25 years in Italy. Although trained to paint landscapes in a very formal manner, after leaving France Benouville began to paint his subjects with a much more personal, nontraditional approach. This may account for this picture's unusual composition, in which much of the canvas is given to indistinct, but beautifully painted stone, sky, and water.
Jean Achille Benouville
Jean-Achille Benouville and his younger brother Léon (1821-1859) were pupils of François-Édouard Picot (1786-1868), the French neoclassical and academic painter and lithographer who specialized in his-tory and genre subjects. Achille studied and sketched in the countryside around Paris, Compiègne, and Fontainebleau and exhibited the finished paintings at the Salon from 1834 on. In 1837, along with his brother Léon, Achille entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From 1838 through 1843 Achille visited Italy at least three times. In 1845 Achille won the Premier Grand Prix in the category Historic Landscape with Ulysses and Nausicaa (École des Beaux-Arts, Paris), a genre he continued to paint until the end of his career. Léon won the same prize in the category of History Paint-ing. Together they went to Rome, where Achille remained with interruptions until 1871, all the while continuing to send his paintings to the Paris Salon. In 1851 he had married Eugénie-Clarisse Quesney Lerouge (1820-1870), and the couple had three children. They eventually separated, and he returned to Paris, remarried in 1871, and continued to travel regularly, several times to the Pyrenees and once to the Netherlands in 1875. While his first works strictly adhered to the academic system of landscape painting, Achille gradually distanced himself from the constraining rules that he had been taught and produced works characterized by greater spontaneity.