François Edouard Bertin

Early in his career the French artist François Edouard Bertin produced a large body of drawings that explore quiet and unpopulated spaces in the Italian countryside. Here we see the Church of San Saba, a rarely visited medieval parish in an obscure southern corner of Rome. Bertin typically framed his drawings with an arch, giving spiritual overtones to the landscape, and he often used a central path to draw viewers into his scenes. Like Corot and other French artists of his generation, he later explored the forest of Fountainbleau outside Paris in search of similar subjects.