Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont

French, 1790 - 1870

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Against a backdrop of stone ruins and rocky mountains, two men wearing long, brown robes address a young boy in this sunlit landscape painting. The people are tiny in scale in relation to the landscape, and they have pale skin. Each man has a bald head surrounded by a ring of hair. They stand in the lower center of the painting on a grassy area that runs alongside a curving stone wall set into the earth. The wall begins near the left edge of the painting and curves toward us, in a shallow U, and extends off the right side. The men are turned to our right with hands outstretched, and they face the boy who holds a hand to his head. The land dips away from us to meet the stone ruins in a shallow valley. The curving wall and ruins are honey brown. The edge of a rust-brown, rocky cliff juts into the scene to our left, and to our right, a steel-gray mountain rises steeply just beyond the ruins. More buildings, these intact, cluster along a cliff-face that overlooks a coastline with ice-blue water. Smoke pours from a snow-tipped mountain in the distance, to our right of center. The mountain’s sloping sides are mottled in sky blue and taupe brown. Parchment-white clouds line the horizon beyond the mountain under a pale blue sky. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “LS 1828,” with the LS joined in a monogram.
Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, The Roman Theater at Taormina, 1828, oil on paper on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.33

The Roman Theater at Taormina

Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont · 1828 · oil on paper on canvas ·  Accession ID  2004.166.33

Steep, rocky cliffs span the right two-thirds of this horizontal painting in front of a distant landscape to the left. A brown stone fortress or castle, with crenellated walls and few visible windows, is built at the edge of the cliff at the center of the image. To the right and higher up on the hill are more reddish-brown stone ruins with tall, narrow towers, also partially overgrown with vegetation. Closer to us and in the bottom right corner of the painting, a person with light skin wearing a brimmed hat and tan and brown clothing stands among several goats and looks out to the left. Some goats graze or stand on the rocky path near the person, while others are scattered farther across the sloping, grassy terrain. The rocky hillside is dotted with patches of green vegetation and shrubs. The base of the cliffs fade in the near distance and beyond them is a wide, hazy valley or plain under a blue sky filled with soft, white clouds. Streaks over mountains along the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition, suggest distant rain. A black mark in the lower right corner could be the artist’s initials, JS, conjoined as a monogram.
Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, View of the Castello di San Giuliano, near Trapani, Sicily, c. 1824/1826, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.34

View of the Castello di San Giuliano, near Trapani, Sicily

Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont · c. 1824/1826 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2004.166.34