Mountain valley with cattle and shepherds

Painting belonging to the Łańcut collection; it depicts a mountain landscape enlivened by a setting made of cattle and people. The source of light is the sun setting behind the mountains, invisible in the painting, casting an orange-pink glow on the mountains, people and animals. The painting dates from 1790 and was painted by Pierre Louis de la Rive, a Swiss painter, designer and engraver, (born in 1753 in Geneva, died 1817 in Presinge), often called the “inventor” of the Alpine landscape. He used to paint the peak of Mont Blanc in different lighting and at different times of day. He came from a wealthy family; his father, who was a pastor, planned for him the career of a jurist. He received his first instruction in painting from the knight Nicolas Henri Fassin, a landscape painter from Liege, who encouraged him to copy the works of the Flemish masters. In 1776 he went to Germany, where he studied in Dresden at the Academy of Fine Arts under Giovanni Battista Casanova. It was Casanova who encouraged de la Rive to stop copying and try his own hand at landscape painting. De la Rive then spent 18 months in Rome, where his first landscapes were painted. After returning to Switzerland in 1797, he settled in Presigne and took up painting landscapes and paintings with historical content. The first exhibitions of his works were held in the Paris Salon between 1799 and 1801. His paintings were initially influenced by Berchem and Wouwerman, then by neo-Classicism in his very elaborate landscapes of Lake Geneva (from 1790); up to Italian influences in his pre-Romantic Alpine landscapes.