In 1778 Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, a young landscape painter from Toulouse, found himself in Rome with many other foreign artists intent on studying not only the ancient monuments and the works of the modern masters, but also to encounter Italy’s light and landscape. Contrary to most of his companions, Valenciennes rarely copied ancient or modern works of art, but instead he chose to sketch views of Rome, ‘a mix of antique and of modern, an assemblage of irregularity and symmetry’. The 96 pages of the sketchbook, reproduced in their actual size and accompanied by a commentary, guide us through Rome, from the river port of Ripa Grande to the basilica of St. John Lateran, from the Ponte Salario bridge to the Vatican, from Piazza Barberini to the Villa Borghese and along the banks of the river Tiber. An advocate of en plein air painting, Valenciennes’ sketches use two or three tints of the same colour to trace the landscape of an ideal Rome, and to achieve this goal he did not hesitate to modify or move the surrounding architecture. AUTHOR: Juliette Trey began her career as a curator of 18th-century paintings at the Chateau de Versaille and joined the Prints and Drawings department of the Louvre in 2013 as curator of French drawings from the 17th and 18th centuries. She has curated several exhibitions and in 2016 she published a general catalogue of Edme Bouchardon’s drawings. SELLING POINTS: . First reproduction (almost a facsimile) of this beautiful sketchbook . A must for all art lovers but also those who practice sketching en plein air . Important for scholars of 18th century Rome 110 colour images Text in French