Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont

In 1859 Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont gave four large landscapes to the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. They honoured her friend Augustine Dufresne, widow of the painter Antoine-Jean Gros, who had died in 1842. Three of the pictures show Florence, Rome and Naples and stand for faith, hope and charity. The fourth is a broad view of Paris from the heights of the Père Lachaise cemetery, almost two metres wide.

She was born in Versailles in 1790 and became a favourite pupil of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the influential landscape teacher, who taught young women when the official art school would not admit them. She showed at the Salon from 1812. The Empress Joséphine ordered views of her house at Malmaison, and after the monarchy returned, the Duchess of Berry, daughter-in-law of King Charles X, owned 12 of her Italian landscapes.

Travel shaped her work. She painted in Rome, Naples and Sicily in the mid-1820s, spent years in the Pyrenees from 1828, and kept going back to Italy for long stays. She won a first-class medal at the Salon of 1834 and sent her last pictures there in 1868, two years before her death in Paris.