River Landscape
Alexandre François Desportes French
Not on view
Desportes’s landscape studies executed outdoors in oil on paper predate the widespread use of this practice in France by over a century. Most of these oil sketches were sold in 1785 to the French state by Desportes’s son, who described his father’s tools as including a portable palette and a special cane with, on one end, a steel tip that could be staked into the earth and, on the other, a metal frame that supported sheets of paper. In 1708 the influential art theorist Roger de Piles published an important treatise that outlined Desportes’s practice as a model for aspiring landscape painters.
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