JULES-LOUIS-PHILIPPE COIGNET (1798–1860)

VIEW OF SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO, ROME
Signed, inscribed & dated 1823 l.l., inscribed verso Murs de Rome
Watercolour
11 x 15 cm
 
Exhibited:
Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, Nineteenth Century French Drawings, 
15 June – 14 July 1978, cat. no. 13
 
Provenance:
Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London;
Where purchased by Sir Jack & Lady Baer, Kensington
 
 
Coignet was a distinguished landscapist who studied under the great neo-classicist Jean-Victor Bertin. He was an avid traveller, visiting much of Europe and North Africa, as well as Rome on at least two separate occasions. A regular exhibitor at the Salon in Paris, Coignet was awarded the gold medal there in 1824. He was later recognised by the French state when he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honeur in 1836.
 
 
Coignet began his career working in the tradition of ‘historical’ landscape artists, like many of his peers, but his salon submissions were largely topographical views, based on plein air oil sketches on board. Coignet distinguished himself with these sketches which, unusually, were even appreciated in his lifetime (unlike many of his peers’), to the extent that a sale was held in Paris of these works (Lugt 13836). Today’s art historians and collectors now appreciate the value of the such spontaneous sketches in oils, with the recent ‘True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Fondation Custodia, Paris, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the most recent testament to these works’ importance. 
 
As well as a highly competent painter in oils, Coignet was a  prolific and exacting draughtsman, and produced a large body of pencil drawings (many of them now at the Musée d'Art, Clermont-Ferrand). He was also influential as a teacher: his studio attracted many students and, in 1848, he published a treatise on landscape painting titled Cours Complet de Paysage.