236. CASTLE OF SANT' ANGELO, ROME.
Claude Joseph Vernet (French: 1714-1789).
Vernet, one of the most celebrated of French landscape and marine painters, received his inspiration and lived a large part of his life in Italy. He was born at Avignon, and in 1732 went to Italy with a view of improving himself in historical painting, but the beautiful scenery of Genoa and Naples induced him to devote himself to marine landscape. One of his Mediterranean pictures is No. 1393 in this Gallery. It is said that on his first voyage he was so impressed with the effect of a stormy sea as to have himself tied to the mast in order to be able more accurately to observe it. For some time Vernet lived in poverty. He had to paint carriages, and a picture, afterwards sold for 5000 francs, procured him only a single suit of clothes. His subjects were now the rivers, landscapes, and costumes of Rome (as in this picture). In 1752 he was invited to Paris by Louis XV. In the following year he was elected a member of the French Academy of Arts, and was commissioned by the Government to paint his celebrated pictures, now in the Louvre, of the seaports of France. This task occupied him the greater part of the year. He died in the Louvre, where he had been given apartments by the king. His last years were embittered by the madness of his wife, a daughter of the Pope's naval commandant, whom he had married in 1745. He was the grandfather of the celebrated historical painter, Horace Vernet (see 1285).
Past and present in the eternal city, as it was in Vernet's day. Behind is the castle which the Emperor Hadrian had built for his family tomb, in which were buried several of the Emperors after him, and the history of which in the Middle Ages was almost the history of Rome itself. In front is a fête on the Tiber, with a fashionable crowd in crinolines watching the boats tilting on the river.