Jean-antoine Constantin d'Aix (1756-1844) - Women Fleeing Before A Serpent

Jean-Antoine Constantin d'Aix (1756-1844) - Women fleeing before a snake

Oil on canvas
Signed lower right "constantin"
Dimensions: 79 x 38 cm

Jean Antoine Constantin, better known as Constantin d'Aix is a painter born in Aix-en-Provence. He will be considered as the master of Provençal painting and one of the precursors of romantic landscape painting. After his stay in Rome, he settled in the city of Aix-en-Provence and got married there. He will create an impressive amount of Aix and Provence landscapes, generally painted on the motif. This is how he collects monuments and landscapes as varied as the city of Digne, the Fontaine de Vaucluse or the harbor of Marseille. Our landscape with neoclassical accents depicts a scene whose subject is unique but not unprecedented because we know of the existence of a drawing by the artist recently auctioned which represents the flight of two young girls in front of a large snake. impressive. Two centuries earlier, Nicolas Poussin had a similar subject painted which describes a man also frightened by a snake. Constantine draws from Poussin's neoclassical painting the influence necessary to express his own conception of the neoclassical landscape, which he gradually tinted with a sentimental note. He liked to paint his region and the Sainte Victoire mountain that can be seen on the horizon in our landscape.