Charles-François Grenier de Lacroix, called Lacroix de Marseille

Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Beautés de la Provence, December 1947 - January 1948, cat. nos. 80 & 81.

Both canvases are unlined. The paint surfaces are secure and in good condition, retaining much of their original impasto under a slightly yellowed varnish. Inspection under UV light reveals some significant areas of repaint in the sky of the former and almost no intervention work in the latter, bar an area of repaint upper right 4 by 4 cm above the arch. Offered in a carved gilt wood frame in fair condition if a little rubbed.
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Lacroix de Marseille is best known for his many coastal landscapes in thr manner of Joseph Vernet, with whom he studied in Rome in the 1750s, and such works constitute the vast majority of his oeuvre. These two unusual canvases were painted towards the end of his career in Paris and differ markedly from the earlier views on which he found fame. While wholly exemplary of the 18th century taste for capricci of classical ruins, that had been born at the start of the century after events such as the unearthing of Herculaneum in 1709, they are extremely unusual for their portrayal of Roman ruins in southern France rather than Italy. Interest in these French ruins had been awakened only a few years before the present works were painted when, in 1772, Charles-Joseph Natiore, the director fo the French Academy, suggested to the Marquis de Marigny, the Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, that he commission a pair of paintings depicting the ruins of Provence to act as pendants to a pair of port views by Vernet. And in 1778, Clérisseau published his Les antiquités de France which concerned the ruins of the town of Nîmes.

The former of these two capricci shows several of these Roman buildings in Nîmes; to the left is one of the best preseved Roman temples of all, the so-called Maison Carrée, built by Agrippa in 16 B.C. and rededicated to his sons Gaius and Lucius Caesar. Behind is the Arena, also amazingly intact, and still used today for bullfights. To the right of the temple is an obelisk imported from Egypt and the ruin at the right may represent the temple of the goddess Diana, so favoured by Hubert Robert.

The latter represents the triumphal arch at Orange (Arausio), rededicated to the Emperor Tiberius in A.D. 28. Behind is a section of the aqueduct at Fréjus and the tower to the left is the cenotaph of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, grandsons of Emperor Augustus. The arch at the extreme left is in Saint Rémy.