A landscape with a ruined bridge and herders leading their cattle

This painting is one of only four surviving works on copper by Pierre Patel and the last remaining in private hands. While other coppers by Patel are recorded in late eighteenth-century French auctions, the only ones known to survive today are in the Kunstmuseum, Basel (inv. no. 1181); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. no. 17608); and Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. RF 3981). Like those paintings, the present work reveals Patel's marvelous ability to capture the effects of an enveloping southern light, which warmly illuminates a bucolic landscape. Here, the ancient ruins and rustic staffage evoke the Roman Campagna, and the radiant vista, whose sweeping sky seems to suggest the passage of time, recalls Virgil's enticing myth of a lost Arcadia.

The present work has been dated by Natalie Coural to the late 1630s (loc. cit.), not long after the artist had been admitted into the guild of St Germain-des-Prés (1633⁄1634) and the Académie de Saint-Luc (1635). As such, this pristinely preserved copper can be counted among the artist's earliest surviving works, and represented an important addition to Patel's oeuvre when it was rediscovered in 2010.