The Castle of Collegno in a Storm

In the last years of his reign, before his sudden death in 1796, King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia commissioned five views of the country around Turin from Jules-César-Denis van Loo, a French painter then working for his court. Van Loo painted them between 1792 and 1794, and each takes its title from an effect of light or weather. This one, from 1793, shows the castle of Collegno, just west of the city, in a thunderstorm. His landscapes keep a classical structure, yet they stay close to the real look of the places, with a taste, new at the time, for unsettled weather. The series became a reference point for the next generation of Piedmontese landscape painters, and this storm in particular remained a model for more than a generation, from the watercolourist Giovanni Battista De Gubernatis to the painter Francesco Gonin.