This beautiful early 19th-century oil painting attributed to French artist Louis B�langer (1756-1816) depicts an extensive Italianate view with picturesque classical ruins, river, hilltop convent, and figures. B�langer was a distinguished painter of landscapes.Beyond the tinted horizon, a slumberous sun casts its final glow across a scene of untarnished Arcadian bliss. A temple, reminiscent of Tivoli�s Vesta, stands majestically amid foliage, while a distant convent gleams with illumination. It�s a romanticised vignette of imagined pastoral life, where the waters sparkle like crystalline prose and the abundant air seems to shimmer and blur. In the foreground, a figure holds a net aloft while a boy stands beyond. Perhaps it�s a father teaching his enthusiastic son the age-old craft of fishing.�Breathless with adoration; the broad sun, is sinking down in its tranquillity.� William Wordsworth.Pleasing visions of the Italian countryside, particularly the Roman Campagna, were popular with aristocratic young gentlemen seeking to furnish their homes with mementoes from their Grand Tour. The majority of these views were essentially a collage of sketches stitched together for artistic effect. The artists would usually draw amid nature before returning to the studio to complete their finished compositions.A key figure in the evolution of misty Italianate landscapes was Baroque French artist, Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). His, now iconic backlit masterpieces were designed to elevate the scenery to grand proportions. Louis B�langer would�ve been more than aware of his oeuvre. Lorrain, too, combined numerous sketches to great effect in his final works, which exalted the �pastoral life� and were/are exceedingly sought after.It appears that B�langer painted this view on several occasions but with minor alterations in each version. In another, the convent has been replaced with a medieval castle - with the figures different in each. It�s likely that he produced nu...