Simon Mathurin Lantara

The eighteenth century French painter Simon Lantara is known for his landscapes imbued with soft and delicate atmospheric effects. Contemporaries also appreciated Lantara’s nocturnal scenes where subtle backlighting highlights the elements of the landscape. Simon Lantara’s career was quite discreet: he participated twice in the Salon de la Correspondance and never became a member of the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, Lantara enjoyed great notoriety in the nineteenth century, partly due to the success of a Vaudeville play staged in 1810, and of which he was the hero. In this piece, Lantara embodies the Bohemian artist par excellence. Lantara’s reputation as a Bohemian artist, combined with his Bellifontaine origins and his work as a landscape painter, gave Lantara the reputation of being a precursor of the Barbizon school. In truth however, the Lantara’s idealized landscapes are closer to work of Claude Le Lorrain and Joseph Vernet than that of Théodore Rousseau.