Late 18th Century Watercolour, A Swiss Village, Circle Of Claude Louis Châtelet

A late 18th or early 19th century watercolour view of a group of figures in a village square. Though not apparently signed the work is very competent and of high quality. It is framed in a gilt wood frame with a card mount all under glass.

A charming watercolour of a rural village scene. A couple and their young child stand in conversation surrounded by timber framed buildings with high pitched roofs designed for a snowy climate. The artist has captured the light and shade of the scene all under a moody sky and the painting has retained its original colours with little fading.

Claude-Louis Châtelet (1753 – 7 May 1795) was a French painter and draughtsman guillotined at the time of The French Revolution.

Around 1776, Claude-Louis Châtelet travelled throughout Switzerland, alongside the influential farmer-general Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Baron Zurlauben, supervising the transcription of the landscapes into drawings, as part of the preparatory illustrations for the monumental work, Les Tableaux Topographiques de la Suisse, launched by subscription in 1780.

Claude-Louis Châtelet thus acquired a reputation as a landscape painter, which led him to be chosen as one of the main illustrators of one of the most important works of the late eighteenth century, the Voyage Pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, published in five volumes, by Jean-Baptiste Delafosse between 1781 and 1786 by the abbot of Saint-Non.

He then went to Italy in 1778-1779 in the company of Dominique Vivant Denon, Louis-Jean Desprez and Jean-Augustin Renard to execute 132 drawings of Naples, Puglia, the Basilicata region, Calabria and Sicily. Other artists participated in this enterprise, but without necessarily going to Italy, relying on the memory of their past travels: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, Pierre-Adrien Pâris, Pierre-Jacques Volaire, Louis-François Cassas and Jean-Pierre Houël. Châtelet met many people and influential artists in Italy, including in Rome and Florence.

On his return to France, at the request of Queen Marie-Antoinette, of whom he was one of the favourite painters and who commissioned a number of paintings from him, he contributed to the illustration of albums representing the Trianon and its gardens, albums offered by the Queen to her distinguished visitors such as King Gustav III of Sweden, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, Archduke Ferdinand, another brother of the Queen. He also illustrated an edition of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, of which he painted a representation of the tomb at Ermenonville. It was during this period that he executed a series of canvases representing castles and parks and gardens in Île-de-France, which would end up in the private collections of amateurs such as the Abbé de Saint-Non himself, or Richard Mique, Louis XVI's first architect and whom Marie-Antoinette chose for the design of the buildings forming the Queen's hamlet.

Seduced by revolutionary ideas from the insurrection of 10 August 1792, a member of the civil and revolutionary committees of his section, he was elected in June 1793 to the very influential Committee of Surveillance of the Department of Paris which, in conjunction with the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security of the Convention, centralized information on suspects and participated in the requisition of recruits and supplies for the armies of the the Republic, at war with the Kings of Europe. He was appointed by the Committee of Public Safety as a juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal in September 1793. Imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, with whom he was very close, and a victim of the Thermidorian reaction, he was condemned to the guillotine on 6 May 1795 and executed the next day, at the same time as Fouquier-Tinville and Jean-Louis Prieur.

Condition report:

There is a fold to the centre of the paper and some staining to the mount top left. Some losses to frame.