How good life is in the paintings of Louis Gauffier (1762-1801), an artist to whom the Fabre Museum in Montpellier is devoting a first retrospective.
In the clear light of Italy, some young Werther on the Grand Tour - that journey of education supposed to perfect any honest man - is leaning on a ruin.
He has taken off his jacket and breathes a little under the foliage.
Soon he will return to piazza della Signoria, the heart of Florence, in the company of his faithful spaniel.
There he will undoubtedly find his peers.
Like the painter Coclers Van Wyck who, gazing into the distance and smiling happily on his lips, has also placed his drawing board at his feet in the shade.
Or such as Doctor Thomas Penrose, a great English bourgeois who we discover seated on a parapet of the Boboli Gardens.
Gauffier depicts him with sheet and stylus in hand as he strives to reproduce the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore silhouetted against the hills of Fiesole.
Pleasant occupation… Time passing smoothly, within…
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