Provenance

Studio of the artist

Thence by descent through the artist’s family (sale: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Piasa, 24 May 2000, lot [?])

W. M. Brady & Co., New York, 2000

Private collection, New York

Very little is known of Coulon’s formative training.  However, by 1860 he was domiciled in Rome where he met the landscape painter Jules Didier (1831-1914), who dedicated a drawing to him.  At this time, he also met Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) who, having won the Prix de Rome in sculpture, was at the Villa Medici between 1856 and 1862.  Carpeaux gave Coulon several pen and ink studies as well as landscape drawings, all of which were dedicated to him. Coulon exhibited for only three years at the Salon, from 1864 to 1866, including Un lavoir près de Velletri in the Salon of 1866.  Coulon left the army in 1874 with the rank of Infantry Captain, having served in eight campaigns during a career of more than 25 years.¹  In 1877, he exhibited at the Exposition des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse a group of fourteen paintings, drawings, and watercolors, including Italian subjects such as the Roman campagna and the Pontine Marshes (it is not impossible that the present work may have been included in this exhibition).²  He continued to exhibit in Toulouse from 1885 until his death in 1897, including a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1891.

This superb plein-air sketch, dated 1861, was made just before sunset from the window of the artist’s bedroom in Velletri.  A particularly sensitive and lush rendering of this infamous landscape, it shows the Pontine Marshes, beyond the southern border of the town, whose reclamation has been ongoing since the early Roman empire.