Alexandre Desgoffe was already a talented amateur landscape draughtsman when he began his artistic training in the studios of the painters Louis-Etienne Watelet and Jean-Charles-Joseph Remond. In 1827 he entered the studio of Ingres as one of the master’s first pupils, joined the following year by the Flandrin brothers.

Nicknamed ‘Le Père la Nature’ by the artist Jules Laurens, in view of the fact that he painted numerous plein-air studies from nature, Desgoffe exhibited his work at the Salons between 1834 and 1868. He was best known, however, as a painter of historical landscapes, and together with Paul Flandrin, who became his son-in-law, may be regarded as a master of the paysage ingresque. (A fellow landscape painter, Théodore C...