The Environs of Venaria Reale at Dawn

In 1794 the Kingdom of Sardinia had been at war with revolutionary France for two years, and French armies were pushing against the Piedmontese in the Alps. That year a French painter living in Turin, Jules-César-Denis van Loo, painted this calm stretch of country near La Venaria Reale, the Savoy hunting residence just outside the city, at first light. Its Italian title speaks of an effetto d'aurora, a dawn effect, and the gallery hangs it with four more of his Turin-area landscapes named the same way. There is the same Venaria countryside at sunset, from the year before, a landscape by moonlight, a storm over the castle of Collegno and another dawn near Turin. Moonlight and storms had been his calling card since 1784, when he presented such pictures to the Royal Academy in Paris, in the manner of Joseph Vernet, the French master of storms and moonlit harbours. This canvas came to the gallery in 1860, a gift of King Victor Emmanuel II.