Auguste Jean-Baptiste Vinchon’s Memories of Italy

Some sales catalogs become part of art history bibliographies. The one for a July 3 sale in Amboise is sure to be kept by specialists and landscape painting enthusiasts. It will be essential for any art historian who studies Auguste Jean-Baptiste Vinchon's body of work. A pupil of Giuseppe Serangeli, who had trained with French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), he joined the latter’s studio in turn. Vinchon won the 1814 Grand Prix de Rome and from 1816 to 1818 was a resident at the Académie de France, then headed by Théven, in the Eternal City. Back in Paris, and until his death in 1855, Vinchon enjoyed a successful career as a history painter, focusing on both major official projects and portrait commissions. His heirs kept his studio contents for 150 years. In 1922 and 1926, his daughter-in-law donated some of them to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours, which in 1999 received nearly 2,000 further…