LITERATURE -

After training under Henricus Josephus Antonissen (1737-1794) in his native city, Simon-Joseph-Alexandre-Clément Denis moved in the early 1780s to Paris, where he gained the patronage of  Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, the genre painter and art dealer, who helped finance his later travels to Italy.

Denis was in Rome from 1786 until his move to Naples as court painter to King Joseph Bonaparte in 1806. He rapidly made a name for himself there, complimentary notices of his work appearing in the Giornale per le Belle Arti as early as 1787. A later visitor to Rome who sought Denis’ advice recorded “This worthy man was of ordinary appearance, but his keen little eyes gave his expression a great deal of vivacity and wit. His manners, in keeping with his countenance, had inspired my confidence”.

Denis moved in elevated artistic circles, being elected head of the Foundation of St. Julien des Flamands in 1789 and making an excursion to Tivoli in the company of the renowned French portrait painter Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and François Ménageot, director of the French Academy in Rome, in the same year. In 1803 he was elected to the Academy of St. Luke in Rome and was credited by August von Schlegel, in a letter to Goethe of 1805, as one of the area’s greatest landscape painters.