Turpin de Crissé’s Dream of Antiquity

In the early 19 th century, every European artist worth his salt traveled to Italy, an open-air museum that hinted at what Greco-Roman civilization was really like. One of them, Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé (1782-1859), has a prominent place, brilliantly illustrated by his great 1854 panorama Vue imaginaire d'un port antique ( Imaginary View of an Ancient Harbor ). This late work sums up all the talent of a man who seemed destined for an artist’s life. He was born into an aristocratic family of amateur painters, who were his only teachers. His father, Henri-Roland-Lancelot (1754-c.1800), was a colonel in the French Hussar Regiment who simultaneously pursued a painting career…