Rocks by the sea with centaurs

By 1836 the fashion for this kind of picture was already old, and that is rather the point. Turpin de Crissé was a French landscape painter who had made his name under the Empire. Empress Joséphine collected him, he served at court, and he travelled in Italy. What he loved was the classical landscape, the composed Mediterranean coast that Poussin and Claude Lorrain had painted a century and more before him, and he kept at it long after younger artists had turned to real weather and real places. Here he sets centaurs among rocks at the edge of the sea, so the creatures of Greek myth seem to belong to the cliffs as naturally as the light does. There are no ruins and no story being told, only figures from antiquity treated as part of the scenery. He painted it in his fifties, an imagined south assembled from memory and from the old masters he had spent his life looking at.