Édouard Hostein (1804 - 1889) - View of the Chigi Palace in Ariccia

Édouard HOSTEIN (Pléhedel 1804 – Paris 1889)

View of the Chigi Palace in Ariccia

Oil on paper mounted on canvas
Signed lower right
28 x 44.5 cm

Related works: Painting from the Salon of 1849 under number 1059 and titled View taken Larricia (sic) near Rome.

Édouard Hostein is one of the very good landscape painters of the middle of the 19th century. Without a known master, he devoted himself to studies from nature, and began by specializing in lithography, collaborating in particular with Baron Taylor for views of Auvergne, Normandy and the Paris region. From then on, a traveling artist, he stayed in the Ardennes, Alsace and Germany in the second half of the 1830s, before quickly discovering Italy. On his return, he settled quite permanently in the Dauphiné and in particular the Lyon region, making occasional stays in the Paris region, Nantes or Normandy (around 1850 in particular).

At the end of the 1850s, due to the precarious health of his wife, he stopped exhibiting at the Salon and made regular trips to Toulon, where he settled permanently in 1862; he will become a member of the Académie du Var in 1877. Hostein is a “classical” painter, attentive to details and atmospheric rendering, without neglecting the picturesque, with an excellent panoramic sense.

The town of Ariccia is located about thirty kilometers south-east of Rome, in the Alban Mountains, in the same sector as Nemi, Albano and Castel Gandolfo, sites which, like it, were part of the stages of the Grand Tour painters. When the powerful Chigi family ruled the city from 1661, they commissioned Bernini to build the church of Santa Maria Assunta, whose dome we recognize on the right, as well as the Palazzo Chigi, located to the left of the church.

The point of view adopted by Edouard Hostein is the one often used by artists until the 1850s. A thin pink streak underlines the horizon and the panoramic point of view adopted by the painter.