The Great Cascade at Tivoli
signature
Signed and inscribed ‘Partie de la Cascade de Tivoly / l’eau etoit trouble, apres un tems de pluie. / S.n Denis’, lower center, verso; numbered ‘25’, lower right, verso
Provenance
By descent through the artist’s family
Christie’s, Paris, Dessins anciens et du 19eme siècle, 17 March 2005, lot 405
with W. M. Brady & Co., New York
Private Collection, New York, since 2005
Exhibitions
New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Pictures & Oil Sketches, 1775–1920, 30 November–20 December 2005
New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master and 19th-Century Drawings, 1480–1880, 20 January–10 February 2023
Bibliography
W.M. Brady & Co., Pictures and Oil Sketches, 1775–1920, New York, 2005, exh. cat., reproduced no. 2.
W.M. Brady & Co., Old Master and 19th-Century Drawings, 1480–1880, New York, 2023, exh. cat., reproduced no. 16.
Unlike his famous predecessors in the earlier eighteenth century, Hubert Robert (1733–1808) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), who preferred to depict the Great Cascade seen from below, often framed by the picturesque Ponte della Cascata, Denis chose an unusual and much closer viewpoint for this rendering of Tivoli’s most famous site. To better capture the powerful forces of the tumbling water, he limits his scope to the upper part of the cascade—set against the swollen bed of the Aniene River slowly making its way round the bend towards the abyss. An etching by Piranesi, published in 1776, shows a view of the falls taken from a greater distance (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., acc. no. 1974.92.1; fig. 1).[1] It allows one to understand better where the painter placed himself, in a location slightly above the river level, opposite and as close to the waterfall as possible. Rather than the site itself, it is the breathtaking gushes of the cascade, the ‘murky water, after a period of rain’—as Denis noted on the back of the painting—that are the true subject of this work.
Only thirty kilometers from Rome, Tivoli, with its picturesque location, numerous smaller waterfalls, the so-called cascatelle, and its Roman temples and grottoes, proved of considerable appeal to the artist. Having arrived in Rome in 1786, aged thirty-one, with the help of his mentor, Jean Baptiste Lebrun, Denis quickly found his place among the French artistic community there. Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, wife of his Parisian supporter, relates in her Souvenirs how she spent some time in Denis’s excessively noisy lodgings on the Piazza di Spagna, and it was with her and her daughter, Julie, that he seems to have first visited Tivoli in 1789. This was a sketching trip organized by Denis’ friend, François-Guillaume Ménageot, director of the French Academy in Rome, then still installed in the Villa Mancini. Vigée Lebrun recorded this visit in her Souvenirs: ‘M. Ménageot, me mena à Tivoli avec ma fille de Denis, le peintre . . . Nous allâmes s’abord voir les cascatelles… Menagéot nous fit monter par un mauvais petit sentier à pic jusque’au temple de la Sybille . . . Nous couchâmes à l’auberge, et de grand matin nous retournâmes aux cascatelles, où je finis mon esquisse’.[2]
Two further visits to Tivoli are recorded for 1793 [3] and 1801 [4], but Denis is likely to have been there also at other times, given the town’s vicinity to Rome where the artist spent over fifteen years of his life before finally settling in Naples some time between 1801 and 1803. On 31 December 1791, for instance, Lord Bristol, Denis’ early patron in Rome, commissioned a view of thecascatelle—but that was likely a finished painting.[5] Several sketches of the waterfalls at Tivoli, often of details rather than of the whole cascata, were on the art market in 1992.[6] An oil on paper with the full view of the Great Cascade, from the collection of John Gere, is now in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. L821; fig. 2).[7] Denis also turned his sketches into finished paintings which he exhibited at the Salon. In 1795, he sent one to the Salon in Paris, possibly identifiable as that now in the Musée de Grenoble (inv. no. MG 69; fig. 3).[8] The collection at Schloss Emkendorf preserves another large painting of the cascatelle, undated but commissioned by Count Fritz Reventlow before his departure from Rome in 1797.[9] Another view of the cascades of Tivoli, dated 1797, also painted for Count Reventlow, is in Schloss Ahrensburg.[10]
Although Denis’s formal production is comparable to that of other landscape painters working in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century (Bidault, Boguet, Gauffier, and Bertin), it is his oil sketches that accord him a special position, standing out as perhaps the purest expression of eighteenth-century French plein-air painting. In these, he studied with the greatest painterly freedom subjects that would otherwise not have been considered worth a painter’s attention. It was unusual details of water rapidly gushing round rocks, the nuanced play of light on trees and shrubs in woodland, and the dramatic effects and changing appearance of clouds during sunset that captured his imagination. Yet despite the apparent insignificance, even arbitrary choice, of his subject matter, Denis almost always signed and often inscribed his oil sketches, identifying the location and occasionally pointing to the circumstances that had spurred his pictorial curiosity—as this painting clearly shows.
The verso of the paper is inscribed with the number ’25’. Such numbers, which can be found on almost all of Denis’s sketches (the highest known being 160) were probably not inscribed by the artist but almost certainly added later by one of his heirs. Should 160 indeed indicate Denis’s total output of such oil sketches, the size of his oeuvre would be similar to that of his contemporary, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819), the painter of the campagna romana. It has been suggested that these numbers reflect, at least to some extent, a chronological sequence; a view of the Interieur of the Neptune’s Grotto at Tivoli,[11] bearing the number 149, is dated 1801. If that is the case, then we would propose a date of about 1790 for our sketch.