River Landscape with Herdsmen near St. Peter's

A river landscape with herdsmen in the foreground and St. Peter's in the background

Born in Dijon and the son of a tailor, Jean-Baptiste Lallemand traveled in 1744 to Paris, where, a year after his arrival, he became a member of the Académie de Saint-Luc as a landscape painter. Soon thereafter, he went to Rome to continue his studies, arriving in February of 1747, probably accompanied by the painter, Jean Barbault. Inspired by the limitless artistic possibilities of depicting the ruins of Rome’s imperial past, Lallemand was prolific during his Italian sojourn, producing paintings in oil and gouache. During this period, he received a number of commissions by the Roman hierarchy, include commissions from Pope Clement XIII (Carlo Rezzonico) and Cardinal Neri Corsini. In 1762, Lallemand returned to Paris, after a brief stay in Lyon, and regularly exhibited his Italian vedute and capricci at the Academy and at several non-academic venues. He probably journeyed to London around 1769, when the influences of English artists begin to appear in his work and where, in 1773, he exhibited at least one of his works at the London Society of Artists. Lallemand’s most ambitious project was the commission of ninety-nine landscapes of the French countryside that he completed for the fifth volume of Laborde’s Description générale et particulière ou Voyage pittoresque de la France, published in 1781.
This drawing was part of an album by Lallemand, which depicted views of Rome. All similar in size, medium and technique, this group of approximately twenty-two sheets was purchased by Sir Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin in 1799. Elgin is remembered for the vast collection of ancient sculpture, most famously the Parthenon marbles, which he exported to England while serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Porte in Greece. On route to Athens, Elgin stayed with Sir William Hamilton, then ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, who introduced him to the work of Lallemand. At this time, Elgin purchased the album of Roman views, which remained intact in the Bruce family until its dispersal in 1963 (see Agnew’s, Rome and the Campagna: Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, London, 1963). Other drawings from the album are now in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York (see P. Rosenberg, French Master Drawings of the 17th and 18th Centuries in North American Collections, Toronto, 1972, no. 73). Although the majority of Lallemand’s Italian landscapes are of confected compositions, more picturesque than archeologically exact, his drawings from the Elgin album are accurate representations of Rome during the 1750s.