Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont

This luminous panorama of Paris and the river Seine was painted from a window in the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre Palace. Looking east, it represents an idealized view of the city’s architecture, bridges, and riverside activity, bathing them in soft morning light.

Acclaimed by her peers, Sarazin de Belmont sought inspiration in native forests and heroic landscapes. Although landscape painting had long been perceived as lacking the cultural significance of portraits and narrative paintings, she promoted the early 19th-century concept that nature, as embodied in landscape, was the historic, generative foundation on which human achievement was built.