Parigi, vista dalle alture del Père-Lachaise

This is Paris seen from the hill of Pere Lachaise, the great cemetery on the city's eastern edge, painted around 1850 by Louise-Josephine Sarazin de Belmont, one of the few women who made a professional career as a landscape painter in her day, trained in the classical open-air tradition of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. The view is not chosen at random. Somewhere among the tombs below lies her close friend Augustine Dufresne, widow of the painter Antoine-Jean Gros, and the picture is partly an act of remembrance for her. Sarazin de Belmont gave it, with three other landscapes from her travels in Italy, to the city of Toulouse in 1859. She went on painting well into her seventies.