Dunouy

Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy (French, 1757-1841)
View of Parc d’Ermenonville
Oil on canvas
32 x 41cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, UK.

Dunouy was of the same generation as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1758-1846) and Jean-Victor Bertin (1767-1842). Little is known about Dunouy’s early career, but he is presumed to have studied in the studio of the history painter Gabriel Bliard (1725-1777). Dunouy exhibited landscapes at the Salon de la Jeunesse in 1781 and six years later, the View of San Cosima, at the Salon de l’Elysée, suggesting he travelled to Italy at some point during the 1780s. A large canvas, View of Italy, marked his debut at the Salon of 1791, where he continued to exhibit regularly until 1833, receiving medals in 1819 and 1827. He exhibited views of Rome and Naples throughout the 1790s, possibly returning to France by 1798. In that year, his submissions to the Salon included views of Mont Blanc and the Rhone near Lyon. In the 1801 Salon, Army descending the Alps, was much admired by Napoleon Bonaparte. Dunouy served as court painter to Joachim Murat, the King of Naples and the Two Sicilies in 1809, a position he held until 1815. After his return to France in 1815, he continued to exhibit picturesque views of France and Italy at the Salon, adding scenes of the Auvergne, the Savoie, and the Ile-de-France. In the later years, he published portfolios of etchings based on his drawings and paintings.

Several French and British academics have suggested that the site of the above landscape is the picturesque park at Ermenonville, which is 40 km north of Paris, near Chantilly. Over twenty acres of landscaped wooded area were created by the Marquis de Girardin; the Park was justly famous as a beautiful idealistic wilderness appearing untouched by human intervention, embodying the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was buried there.

Jean-Xavier-Joseph Bidauld, Dunouy’s contemporary, to whom the above painting has been attributed in the past, was commissioned by Marquis de Girardin to paint views of the park 1810-1812. However, on stylistic grounds, Dunouy’s distinctive style is seen in the colour and the highlighting of the layers emphasising the broken forms of the jagged rocks in the foreground, a motif he uses in many of his landscape compositions. The closely grouped trees in the middle distance, the round leafy shapes highlighted to catch the sunlight silhouetted against rolling modulated hillsides and the gentle sky seemingly receding well beyond the horizon pulling together the composed forms of the landscape have the clear stamp of Dunouy’s technique.