Almost unknown until not so long ago, Closson is now regarded as one of the most important landscape painters of his native Belgium. Born in Liège, he moved to Paris in 1817, where he apprenticed under the famous history painter Antoine-Jean Gros. In 1825, like many of his colleagues, he set off on a trip to Italy that lasted several years.

The vibrant international community of pensionnaires and expatriates—including artists such as Johan Christian Dahl and Anton Sminck Pitloo—inspired him to abandon academic history painting and devote himself entirely to landscape painting and the study of nature. He roamed the Roman Campagna, sketched and painted in the Colosseum, and travelled as far as Naples. There he became acquainted with the artists of the ‘School of Posillipo’—a group of landscape painters who had gathered around the Dutch artist Anton Sminck Pitloo, who was living and teaching there.

Closson’s approach to painting outdoors is characterised by an extraordinary precision, which stems from his keen powers of observation, combined with a great economy of means. Many of his oil studies display a deliberate use of the ‘non-finito’, an aesthetic of the unfinished. The artist tended to render a single subject with sharpness and three-dimensionality, whilst leaving the edges of the paper untouched. The ground thus remains visible as an open pictorial space, which both frames the subject and suggests its continuation beyond the picture’s boundaries. This brings home to the viewer the nature of the work—oil paint on paper—which stands in a striking contrast to the deceptive character of his brilliant painting.