A traveller-painter, Jean-Pierre Houël placed the observation of the world at the very heart of his artistic practice. The combination of precise recording and artistic sensibility that characterises his work was forged at an early stage through a wide-ranging education. Born in Rouen, he studied under Jean-Baptiste Descamps, author of La Vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais, who introduced him to the painting of the Northern Schools, before continuing his training with the architect Thibault le Vieux, from whom he acquired a mastery of perspective and a taste for ancient architecture. Having arrived in Paris in 1755, he joined the studio of the engraver Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, before studying painting under Francesco Giuseppe Casanova. Thanks to the support of the Duke of Choiseul and the Marquis de Marigny, he obtained in 1769 a royal pension to study at the Académie de France in Rome, paving the way for his first journey to Italy, which took him as far as Naples and Sicily. Agréé (received) by the Académie royale in 1774, Houël exhibited at the Salon from the following year onwards and developed an independent career supported by major collectors, including Barthélemy-Augustin Blondel d’Azincourt and the Duke of Choiseul, who commissioned six overdoors for the Château de Chanteloup.
Although the Italian journey represented, in the eighteenth century, an essential stage in the training of European artists, Sicily remained a rarely visited territory due to its remoteness and the difficulties of access. Nevertheless, Houël returned there for a second time between 1776 and 1780, as part of an official mission entrusted by the Comte d’Angiviller, Director General of the King’s Buildings, to study the island’s antiquities, natural phenomena and local customs. Unlike the collective project directed by the Abbé de Saint-Non, he conceived alone his Voyage pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari, published between 1782 and 1787, for which he himself provided the illustrations based on 264 original drawings.
Although Houël also practised oil painting, it is above all his gouaches that reveal his talent as a landscape painter. Particularly esteemed during the second half of the eighteenth century, this technique was defined by Claude-Henri Watelet in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [1]; its rapid execution and luminous effects made it especially suited to an artistic practice founded upon direct observation of the landscape.
Our gouache brings together Houël’s principal concerns: atmospheric phenomena, geology, ancient architecture and local customs. His sensitivity to meteorological variations, nourished by his study of Dutch Golden Age landscapes and the works of Joseph Vernet, is expressed through the low horizon line and the vast expanse of sky that occupies almost two thirds of the composition. The clouds, animated by the wind, and the touches of white diffuse a crystalline clarity across the silvery reflections of the water and foliage. Like Vernet, Houël observed the effects of backlighting and raking light, yet without pursuing the dramatic effects of the sublime, favouring instead a meticulous rendering of natural phenomena. This same precision can be found in the treatment of mineral and architectural elements: the stones and rocks in the foreground are described with great care, while the bridge recalls Houël’s studies devoted to ancient ruins, in which he annotated proportions and measurements. The figures of peasants and fishermen complete this vision of the landscape, reflecting his attention to local customs and to the relationship between man and his environment. These qualities bring his work closer to that of Hubert Robert, with whom Houël shared a fascination for ruins and for the dialogue between nature and architecture. Their joint contribution to the Voyage pittoresque of the Abbé de Saint-Non testifies to shared artistic concerns and to a mutual awareness of each other’s work.
The dating of Houël’s works remains difficult, as his style retained a remarkable consistency throughout his career. His palette is based on a range of colours dominated by the ochres and whites of architecture, the blues of sky and water, and the greens of vegetation. The bluish tones of our gouache, enlivened by white touches that lend a pearlescent brilliance, as well as the treatment of the water, find parallels in a sheet dated to the 1770s that recently appeared on the art market. The meticulous rendering of the foliage and the harmony of the colour scheme suggest placing our work within this period, although the oblique perspective and contrasts of light and shade also find echoes in later compositions, such as View of the Rock Known as the Chair of Gargantua from the late 1780s (Rouen, musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 1806.1.2). The precise location represented remains uncertain. Far removed from the harbour views and volcanic landscapes of Stromboli or Mount Etna, the gentle undulations of the terrain instead evoke the Roman Campagna. Unusual within Houël’s oeuvre, the motif of the bridge may have been inspired by early views of the Ponte Milvio, or Ponte Molle, popularised by the Northern artists active in Rome, as attested by a drawing by Sebastian Vrancx and an engraving by Jan Both.
Houël’s work is today widely represented in public collections. During his lifetime, the artist sold forty-six views of Sicily to Louis XVI, now preserved in the Musée du Louvre, as well as some five hundred drawings and gouaches to Empress Catherine II of Russia, of which two hundred and seventy entered the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Important groups of works are also held in the Frits Lugt Collection of the Institut Néerlandais in Paris and in the Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen. At the intersection of art and scientific observation, Houël fully embodied the Enlightenment ambition to understand and represent the world in all its complexity. By making his art an instrument of knowledge, he renewed the tradition of the voyage pittoresque and contributed significantly to the development of French landscape painting in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.
D. G.
