Landscape

The Gallery dates this landscape to 1627, when Jacques Fouquier was in Paris as a painter to Louis XIII and was travelling south to Toulon, Marseille and Aix to gather views of the king's cities for a royal commission. A canvas like this one is his other trade, the Antwerp landscape formula he had trained in. Trees close both sides, a path and a dip of ground break the middle, and the colour steps back from brown in the foreground through green to blue at the horizon, with small figures on the track to give the distance its scale. Very little of his painting survives, so this one is read against his signed landscape in the museum at Nantes, which recedes through the same three colours. It came to Athens in the bequest of Stefanos Skouloudis, a banker and diplomat who had sat on the Gallery's supervisory committee since 1906 and served a short term as prime minister of Greece.