ANTOINE-FÉLIX BOISSELIER I (1790-1857)

THE VALLEI DEI MULINI, NEAR AMALFI
Signed l.l. ... [F?]B
Oil on canvas
34 x 26 cm
 
PROVENANCE
With Galerie Charpentier, Paris
Distinguished Private Collection, France
 
EXHIBITED
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1945, Paysages d'Eau Douce, no. 45 (when sold as Victor-Jean Bertin)
 
 
 
 
We are grateful to Stéphane Rouvet for his suggestion of Boisselier as an attribution. The present work is a composition which the artist repeated on at least one further occasion, with that work part of the Eugene Thaw Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (acc. no. 2009.400.9). The so-called 'Gorges at Amalfi', actually in the mountains above the coastal town, was the site of a 13th century ruined flour mill complex.  An almost-identical painting in oils on canvas by Jules-Philipe Coignet (1798-1860) was sold by Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox in 1979 (The Lure of Rome, cat. no. 49, 'Valle dei Molini, Near Amalfi', repr. pl.17, sold for £1,250). 
 
 
Boisselier was born in Paris, and studied with his brother, Félix Boisselier, and the great neoclassical landscape painter Jean-Victor Bertin. He first visited Italy in c.1811, from which year his earliest plain air oil sketches of the country date. He won a second-class medal at the Salon in 1824, before winning second place in the Prix de Rome for Historical Landscapes, behind his friend Achille-Etna Michallon. Boisselier visited Italy again the following year, and painted numerous studies such as the present work, as well as more finished pieces for exhibition, in a style close to his contemporaries at the French Academy in Rome, particularly Corot.