Probably by Louis Gauffier, 'Cliff at Vicovaro', 1787

In order to accurately record the effects of light on leaves or rocks, artists creating open-air oil sketches such as this had to work rapidly and with assurance. The advice from one of the pre-eminent practitioners of open-air painting, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, in his Elémens de perspective pratique (1799), was that an artist should not spend more than two hours on a sketch, and ideally only half an hour, or they would lose the light. He advised artists to focus on the middle ground and ignore the foreground and also to study the minute details of landscapes, such as tree trunks and the shapes of rocks.

The artist of this work took the same approach to open-air sketches as Valenciennes. The foreground is only lightly touched in. The middle ground is the focus of the work, and the brushwork is rapid and expressive but closely observed.

For Valenciennes and the many artists who also produced open-air oil sketches, this approach was always intended to provide material for more worked-up oil paintings on canvas. Through a close study of nature, artists built up a catalogue of sketches that could be used at a later date in the studio. As the studies were not considered finished products in themselves, very often little attempt was made to preserve them and, in many cases, where they have survived, attributions or locations have been lost.

For this study, the location, Vicovaro, was inscribed on the reverse along with the date 1787. The identity of the writer, however, remains uncertain. The handwriting closely resembles that found in a sketchbook of Italian views, marked on the inside cover ‘Gauffier a l’Academie de France a Rome’. Yet, two distinct hands are present in the sketchbook. The first and earliest is that of Gauffier himself. The second, later in date, is not the artist’s. The inscription on this study was written by the second hand. Although not penned by Gauffier, it is believed the writer was closely associated with him and familiar with his movements, and thus aware of the subject of his sketches. The right edge of the sketch suffered damage from damp, and the strip bearing the inscription was trimmed off. The fragment is now preserved in the Gere archive at the National Gallery.

The French artist Louis Gauffier painted in a neoclassical style. He produced a number of paintings of classical subjects. In 1784 he won the Prix de Rome and travelled to Italy. With brief exceptions, he spent the rest of his life there. This sketch would have been produced in his Roman period. Therefore, the identification of the scene as Vicovaro is plausible, as it is only about 45 kilometres north-east of Rome in the Campagna. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, he moved to Florence, where he turned to portraiture. In 1801 his wife, the artist Pauline Gauffier, died and her husband followed her only two months later.