In short

Our painting is to be set between two of the greatest French landscape painters: Claude le Lorrain and Hubert Robert. As in their masterpieces it evokes the lost triumph of a fictitious Classical world.

Pierre Antoine (also known as Pierre II) Patel stepped in the footsteps of his father, who already specialised in this rigorously Classicist style, called Atticism. Father nor son ever travelled to Rome: their attractive architectural views are purely imaginary.

About Pierre Antoine Patel

French painter
Paris 1648 – 1707 Paris

Also known as Pierre Patel II.

Baroque painter of Italianate landscapes with poetic, imaginary ruins of Classical buildings.

Youngest of five children and pupil of the French painter Pierre Patel (1605 – 1676) who influenced him very strongly. In the first half of his career Pierre I had collaborated with both Simon Vouet (1590 – 1649) and with Eustache le Sueur (1616 – 1655), painting landscapes in their decorations of luxurious town palaces (“hôtels particuliers”) in Paris. Pierre I became a successful individual landscape painter, receiving commissions from King Louis XIII and after his death of his widow Queen Anne of Austria, when she was regent to her son, the future King Louis XIV. Pierre I did not choose for the Italian, Baroque lyricism of Simon Vouet, but for the cool Atticism of Eustache le Sueur: a clear, intellectual and imaginary form of Classicism, set against a blue sky. (Atticism refers to the Greek region of Attica, of which Athens is the capital.)

Pierre’s eldest son, Jacques (1635 – 1662), also trained with him as a painter. He sadly died at a young age, in a duel. No works are known by him.

Pierre Antoine (Pierre II) joined in 1677, one year after his father had passed away, the Academy in Paris, which had succeeded to the Guild of Painters and Sculptors. Three years later, in 1680, Pierre Antoine is already mentioned in a notarial deed as “maitre et peintre ordinaire du Roy”, meaning that he worked for King Louis XIV.

Both father and son Patel must never have travelled to Italy, as none of the ruins in their drawings or paintings represent existing buildings. They chose to paint clearly lit, crumbling walls and columns of strange, unrealistic buildings. 

About our painting

Our painter has, just as his father and his great example Claude le Lorrain, not attempted to faithfully recreate with archaeological rigour any existing ruins of Classical buildings. 

Patel has represented a nymphaeum, a temple consecrated to water nymphs. In the monumental, theatrical environment of our painting some figures of shepherds and travellers do not seem to pay much attention to these splendid testimonies of a glorious, but fictitious past.

Why should you by this painting?

Because this delicate composition with its clear and luminous colours and fine touch pleases also to a modern audience.