ARTIST: Camille Joseph Etienne Rocqueplan (France, 1800/03 - 1855)
NAME: Landscape
MEDIUM: watercolor on paper
CONDITION: Some age toning. Very faint foxing. Framed under glass. Some damages to frame.
SIGHT SIZE: 13 x 9 inches / 33 x 22 cm
FRAME SIZE: 19 x 15 inches / 48 x 38 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 117560
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BIOGRAPHY:
19th century French Romantic painter and lithographer, Camille-Joseph-Etienne Roqueplan. He was born in the small town of Mallemort which lies thirty-five kilometres south west of Avignon, but his family moved to Paris when he was still quite young. He came from a well-to-do and cultured family and his younger brother Louis-Victor-Nestor Roqueplan went on to become a well-known writer, journalist, and co-director of the Paris Opera. Contrary to most young people who want to become artists despite opposition from their parents, Camille Roqueplan was wary about having art as his future profession despite his father's encouragement that this should be his future path. Camille liked to paint, but he believed art was just something to do for relaxation and should not be conceived as a future profession for he was adamant that his future lay in medicine. His foray into studying medicine and anatomy was brief and having failed his first set of exams he went to work in the same office as his father, as a clerk in the Department of Finance. This bureaucratic career was also short lived as he became bored and so after many career false starts he returned to paintingIn February 1818, shortly after Camille's eighteenth birthday he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he received his initial art tuition in the workshop of the French artist, Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, but remained with him for just a short period before working in the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, the French history and neo-classical painter, where he learnt to paint landscapes, marine paintings, historical subjects and genre scenes. He used both the mediums of watercolours and oil and was taught the secrets of lithography, which at the time was a new method of printmaking. He remained in Antoine-Jean Gros workshop for three years.Around 1835, Roqueplan changes his painting style from small landscape paintings to large-scale anecdotal works and one of his most famous of these can be seen at the Wallace Collection in London. It was completed by Roqueplan in 1836, in time to be exhibited at that year's Salon in Paris. In 1830, on the abdication of Charles X of France, a new king was crowned. He was Louis Philippe and it was he who decided that some of the palace rooms at Versailles should be set aside for a Museum of the History of France. These rooms were then filled with a large collection of paintings from the likes of Philippe de Champaigne, Charles Le Brun, Jacques-Louis David, Antoine Jean Gros, Rubens and the great female artist of the time, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, and one room was designated as the Galerie des Batailles (Hall of Battles) in which works depicting great French battles could be displayed. Roqueplan contributed a work entitled Battle of Elchingem, which he completed in 1837, and featured a scene from the October 1805 battle between the victorious French forces under Marshal Ney and the Austrian army around the town of Elchingem in south west Bavaria Roqueplan's health deteriorated in 1843 and as an aid to recovery he spent time in the foothills of the Pyrennees with its fresher and cleaner air. He remained there for three years during which time he painted many scenes depicting mountainous landscapes and peasant life.