The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Adele S. Browning Memorial Collection, gift of Mildred Browning Green and Honorable Lucius Peyton Green
Louis Gabriel Moreau, known as Moreau l'aîné to distinguish him from his younger brother and fellow artist Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814), trained with Pierre de Machy (1723-1807), a prolific painter of the Parisian landscape in the mid-eighteenth century. Like his teacher, Moreau favored subjects drawn from a repertoire of familiar sites in the capital and its immediate surroundings. This view of the park of the château de Saint-Cloud was one of a number of landscapes featuring Parisian imagery that Moreau sent to the Salon in 1804. Saint-Cloud was a frequent subject for French landscape painters under the ancien régime, when a popular festival drew crowds from Paris every September, and it remained so during the Napoleonic era, when the château became a favored residence of the emperor and the park a popular destination for Parisians seeking suburban recreation. Moreau made many paintings, gouaches, and sketches of the park and surroundings of the château. This view differs from his earlier depictions of the park and from those of his contemporaries, which generally favored a view showing the wide staircase leading to the upper gardens, historically the restricted domain of the royal family, and to the château itself. Here, Moreau instead shows a quiet corner, apparently in the upper gardens, without any vista into the park. Tall trees frame the view to a distant horizon and tower over the diminutive, thinly painted figures peopling the foreground.
