Le pont d’Auguste ("The Bridge of Augustus") by Jean-Victor Bertin, 1818

Jean-Victor Bertin began his career as a student of Gabriel-François Doyen (1785) at the Royal Academy of Painting, before continuing his training with Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the great artist and theorist of landscape painting. Under his influence, Bertin became very active in the defense of the landscape "genre", at the time still considered a minor genre in the Academy's hierarchy. He even proposed the creation of a specific prize for "historical landscape" as early as 1801, a proposal that was not adopted until sixteen years later, in 1817.

He exhibited regularly at the Salons from 1793 to 1842 and won several awards during his career. Although attached to the classical movement, Jean-Victor Bertin developed his pictorial technique throughout his work. A new generation of landscape painters emerged from his studio, including Camille Corot, Léon Fleury, Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond and Jules Coignet.

Despite this aesthetic openness, the landscape, executed around 1818 as part of a decorative commission, is marked by a classicism very much in evidence in the work of Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld, who around 1790 conceived a Paysage de Narni avec le pont d'Auguste (private collection) far more precise in its realistic notations and much more vivid in its color contrasts. Camille Corot's 1826 version, executed during a brief stay in Italy, served as a model for the larger, more finished Vue à Narni, exhibited at the 1827 Salon and now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. This taller version accentuates the freshness of the outdoor painting. The motif of the Narni bridge is thus the subject of a pictorial reflection between the classical reference to the ruins of the reign of Augustus and the research of this new generation of landscape painters.

Jean-Victor Bertin takes up the theme of the famous Pont d'Auguste, in a typical neoclassical landscape, in a composition found in other works (Sotheby's sale, New York, January 27, 2011) with an elegant enamel finish and soft lavender-blue tones in the background, barely animated by clouds and a waterfall. In the left-hand shadow of the painting, the painter portrays picturesque characters, reminiscent of the reality of Italy; in the right-hand corner, he paints an unconventional horseman with a spear, emerging from the waves like a mythological figure dressed in modern clothes, a distant model inherited from Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. Jean-Victor Bertin responds to the demands of historical or "heroic" landscape, based on imagination and the recomposition of nature in the studio.

Suzanne Gutwirth, « Jean-Victor Bertin (1767-1842). Un paysagiste néoclassique, » thèse de l’École de Louvre, Paris, École du Louvre, 1969.

Suzanne Gutwirth, « Jean-Victor Bertin, un paysagiste néoclassique (1767-1842) », Gazette des beaux-arts, n^o LXXXIII, mai-juin 1974, p. 337-35.