A Mediterranean coastal landscape with fishermen in moonlight, signed and dated at lower left: Gr De Lacroix. Rom. 1755; A Mediterranean coastal landscape at sunset with a boat, figures in oriental dress and fishermen, signed and dated at lower right: Gr De Lacroix ft. Roma 1755, oil on canvas, each 48.5 x 62.5 cm, framed (2)

We are grateful to Jean-Luc Ryaux for confirming the attribution of the present paintings on the basis of high-resolution digital photographs. He will publish the paintings in his forthcoming monograph on the artist.

The present compositions were painted in 1755, when Lacroix de Marseille was in Rome. Little is known about the artist’s early life or when exactly he arrived in Italy, as he is not recorded until 1750, when the Marquis de Vandières met him in Rome. A painting from this period, A View of a Seaport, signed and dated “Grenier de La Croix, fecit Rom 1750”, exists in Ohio, Toledano Museum of Art (see France and the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy, 6 January 1968 – 3 March 1969, no. 358).

In the absence of any documentary evidence it has traditionally been assumed that Lacroix was a pupil of Claude-Joseph Vernet and that they were evidently working side by side in Rome in 1751, when Lacroix executed four copies of Vernet’s work (Uppark, Sussex). Lacroix’s copies are almost indistinguishable from Vernet’s originals, which may help to explain why he only emerged from obscurity after his and Vernet’s paths separated in 1753, with Vernet returning to France, leaving Lacroix in Rome. Lacroix spent more than another ten years there before returning to France, where he is recorded in 1776 and 1780. He died in 1782, in Berlin, according to Pahin de la Blancherie.