Simon-Joseph-Alexandre Clement Denis

(Belgian, 1755-1812)

A Turkish capriccio

Footnotes

Provenance
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 17 January 1986, lot 136.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 22 May 1997, lot 20.
His Royal Highness Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei.
Private collection, UK.
Acquired from the above by the current owner.

This extraordinary subject, depicting a Turkish riverside scene envisaged in neoclassical taste, crisply detailed with camels walking over a bridge and figures taking coffee and smoking chibouk pipes, is unique in the artist's oeuvre.¹ The elegant European figure on the far bank is also intriguing and draws the viewer's attention, suggesting that this may be a portrait of the artist's patron.

Simon Denis (1755-1813) was born in Antwerp where he studied before moving to Paris, gaining the patronage of Jean-Baptiste Le Brun. Le Brun's support allowed him to move to Rome after 1786. Denis specialised in finished landscapes of famous sites, such as the waterfalls of Tivoli, which brought great acclaim and a close relationship with the head of the French academy in Rome, as well as with other artists including Le Brun's more famous wife Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun.

Denis' technique was exact and meticulous, paying great attention to naturalistic details and light effects. Indeed, the artist is considered an early exponent of plein-air painting, making open air oil sketches around Rome which he usually signed and annotated. ² Denis was appointed court painter to Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, in 1806, and remained in Italy until his death in 1813.

Paintings depicting Ottoman Turkey during the second half of the eighteenth century were, as Haydn Williams has recently written, 'invariably painted by resident European artists' and that 'whatever the artistic liberties taken, these works were essentially documentary.' ³ It was certainly true that amongst a number of travel books published in the period there was a desire to document precisely the topography of the Ottoman Empire and the customs and habits of its people with huge engraved plates drawn by prominent local European artists. Notable amongst them was I. M. d'Olisson, Tableaux Général de L'Empire Othoman, which began publication in Paris in 1787. ⁴ The culmination of European publishing interest in Ottoman culture and history was the issue in 1819 by Antoine-Ignace Melling of his magisterial Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des vues du Bosphore, which was so expensive it was issued only to subscribers; the work to engrave the plates depicting the river and sea views had begun sixteen years earlier. ⁵

Ottoman subject painting developed much earlier still, and indeed the French artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671-1737) produced a great many paintings of daily life in the Levant, most being in reality capriccios of Turkish life, which were acquired by European visitors to Constantinople.⁶ Increased interest in Turkey was also stimulated by the Ottoman embassies to France in 1721 and 1742 where a fascination developed with Ottoman tented cities, particularly after the presentation by the Sultan to Louis XV of a number of Ottoman tents. In his memoirs, written while imprisoned during the French Revolution, Jean-Nicolas Dufort, comte de Cheverny, recounted that one summer in the 1750s the Ottoman tents that had been presented to the king were erected in a forest clearing at the chateau de Compiegne, and that around them was a flower-filled garden with fountains and caged birds from the four corners of the world.⁷ The later fashion for more permanent Ottoman tent-style buildings in a jardin anglais is well documented, as for example at Painshill in England (now largely restored), but the fashion was also popular in France: a 'Tartar Tent' was one of the buildings erected at the Désert de Retz, a famous garden on the edge of the forêt de Marly in the commune of Chambourcy in the 1780s.

It is interesting that in Simon Denis' extraordinary crisply detailed landscape, essentially a Turkish riverside capriccio, but here in neoclassical taste, painted during the first year of the French Revolution, many of the elements that had formed the subject of topographical prints and paintings for about a century may be observed. Dr. Valentina Branchini has commented that this painting, with characters along the bank of the river supplied with turbans, drinking coffee and smoking chibouk pipes, and the camels crossing the stone bridge, nevertheless represents an isolated example in the production of Simon Denis, entirely because of its oriental setting. She argues that despite this view being identified with the surroundings of Istanbul when it was sold publicly in 1997, and despite a "reality" that appears in the picture, Simon Denis never actually visited Turkey. Branchini cites a lack of evidence indicating Denis almost certainly never made the journey from Rome to Constantinople because no letter by or to Denis, nor any other picture like the present canvas is preserved.⁸ Her view is partially supported in the writings of a Dutchman, H. Voogd, that in May 1790 he had been frequenting the studio of Denis in Rome, and therefore the likelihood that the picture is topographical seems slight.⁹ That said, the trees in the left foreground and centre of the landscape bear a resemblance to the Black Poplar (Populus nigra) which has a wide distribution in Turkey and has been cultivated by farmers on private lands for centuries; the trees beside the clearing also look like the more usual European Poplar (Populus), of which there are some 35 species of trees in the willow family (Salicaceae) native to the Northern Hemisphere; and the small group of trees by the river bank and kiosk might be the Turkish pine (Pinus brutia), which is native to the eastern Mediterranean region. Nevertheless, evidence that Denis may have made a visit to Turkey in the second half of 1790 remains elusive. Moreover, whilst there was certainly a taste in the 1780s under Queen Maria Carolina for le jardin anglais in Naples (whence Denis travelled in 1806 when appointed court painter to Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, remaining in the city until his death in 1813), there is apparently no evidence presently that there was ever a taste for informal Turkish landscape gardens in southern Italy.

Branchini believes it more plausible that the landscape fits into the phenomenon that occurred in eighteenth-century in England, France, and Italy, the vogue for 'le goût turquerie'. Whilst this was essentially an artificial evocation of the dream of an imaginary East (as in Mozart's comic opera of 1782 set in Turkey: Die Entführung aus dem Serail – The Escape from the Seraglio), in subject painting it reflected an aristocratic play on various exotic associations and picturesque stereotypes drawn from the works of those European artists in Constantinople during the previous century, which naturally included those painted by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour that were printed in 1714 by Charles de Ferriol, Ambassador of the King of France at the so-called Sublime Porte.¹⁰ Branchini suggests that Simon Denis simply dressed a neoclassical landscape known to him in an imagined East, perhaps to satisfy the will of one of his aristocratic clients who was a devotee of Turquerie,¹¹ possibly one who had been displaced from France by the Revolution for whom the fanciful landscape gave some semblance of calm and order, or possibly one of the visiting English 'milordi' (maybe even the man in western dress, tailcoat and breeches, in the centre of the painting), for whom a Turkish landscape capriccio was part of a continual demand for exotic novelties on his Grand Tour and which gave him a glimmer of a fanciful world created during the ancien regime that was at this precise moment collapsing.

But whether this picture was painted in Rome or Naples, or had its origins in engraved depictions of Turkey, is ultimately unimportant, for Simon Denis produced a unique and delightful masterpiece that continues to entrance, surprise, and entertain the beholder.

¹ V. Branchini, Simon Denis, (1755-1813) in Italia: dipinti e disegni di paesaggio, PhD thesis, University of Bologna, 2003, no. 11 (unpublished). The author was not able to examine the original painting.
² Philip Conisbee, Vincent Pomarede, et al., In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 145-149.
³ Haydn Williams, Turquerie: An Eighteenth Century European Fantasy, Thames & Hudson, 2014, p. 89.
⁴ The importance of this travel book and its engraved illustrations is discussed in Mediterannean Encounters: Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire 1774-1839 (ed. Elisabeth A. Fraser), Penn State University Press, 2017, Chapter 3, pp. 99ff.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ See: Olga Nefedova, A Journey into the World of the Ottomans: The Catalogue, Skira, 2011, for a general account of European painting in the Ottoman empire from the 16th to 20th centuries; and specifically, Olga Nefedova, A Journey into the World of the Ottomans: The Art of Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671-1737), Skira, 2009, passim; and Seth Gopin et al., Jean Baptiste Vanmour: Peintre de la Sublime Porte (1671-1737), Illustria Librairie des musées, 2009.
⁷ Williams, Turquerie, p. 116.
⁸ V. Branchini, Simon Denis, no. 11.
⁹ Denis Coekelberghs, Les Peintres Belges à Rome de 1700 à 1830, Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1976, p. 306.
¹⁰ Charles de Ferriol, Recueil de cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant, [with] Explication des cent estampes représentent les costumes des differentes nations du Levant, Paris, 1714.
¹¹ Branchini, Simon Denis, no. 11.