JOSEPH VERNET
One has to realise that the art of landscape painting had become almost extinct in France, and that the art of seascape had never existed, if one wishes to account for Diderot’s enthusiasm with regard to Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), which made him exclaim, “What pictures! He rivals the Creator in celerity, Nature in truth!” Our cooler judgment cannot so easily pass over all that is cold and formal in his art. But, taken in relation to his contemporaries, he deserves respect for his emotional attitude towards nature, for a sense of the dramatic that approaches Salvator Rosa’s, and for his admirable drawing of the figures introduced into his landscapes. Vernet’s love of the sea awoke when at the age of eighteen he journeyed to Rome, where he became imbued with the classic tradition. He only returned to Paris in 1752, and soon afterwards received from Louis xv. the commission to paint the large series of French Seaports (Nos. 940–954) which are now to be seen in the rooms in this collection given up to the Musée de Marine. In his other marines and landscapes (Nos. 912–939), not all of which are actually exhibited, he allowed his imagination freer play than in the Seaports, which were naturally of more topographic character.
Both his son Carle Vernet (1758–1836), a historical painter who excelled in the rendering of horses in movement, and his grandson Horace Vernet (1789–1863), a popular battle painter, are represented at the Louvre, the former by the Stag Hunt in the Forest of Meudon (No. 955), and the latter by the Barrière de Clichy (Defence of Paris in 1814) (No. 956), and the uninspired Judith and Holofernes (No. 957).