MOUNT VESUVIUS PAINTED BY CHARLES MOUTON-DUGASSEAU

 CHARLES MOUTON-DUGASSEAU (1812- 1883)
Mount Vesuvius (1,281m - 4,203ft)
Italy

In La Baie de Naples avec une éruption du Vésuve sous la neige,
6 January 1836,(Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius Erupting and Covered in Snow), 6 Janvier 1836,
Gouache on paper 42.7cm x 63.3cm.
Private collection

The artist
Charles Dugasseau, born Charles-Alexandre-Ernest Mouton or Mouton-Dugasseau  was a painter, designer and curator of the Tessé Museum in Le Mans. After making his debut at Le Mans in 1836, Charles Dugasseau spent seven years in Italy in Rome. Student of Ingres who describes him as his friend, and who invites him to come and listen to music until the end of his days. His Sapho exhibited at the Salon in 1845, with Christ surrounded by the founders of the religion, was noticed by Francis Wey, Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire who made this comment: “Serious painting, but pedantic - looks like a very solid Lehmann. His Sapho making the leap of Lefkada is a pretty composition ”.
Nephew of Narcisse Desportes, curator of the Tessé Museum and botanist, Charles Dugasseau replaced him in 1856. He increased the museum's collection by making purchases, in particular twenty-three works by Italian primitives acquired during the sale after the death of a collector from Manceau, Évariste Fouret (1807-1863). He requests deposits from the French State and makes or has made many copies of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, (Joconda), Bernardino Luini, Francesco Melzi (Flora ou Colombine or La Dame au jasmin), Andrea Solari (The Virgin with the Green Cushion).
The second part of his career was devoted to landscape painting.

The mountain 

Mount Vesuvius (1,281 meters- 4,203 ft at present) is one of those legendary and mythic mountains the Earth paid regularly tribute. Monte Vesuvio in Italian modern langage or Mons Vesuvius in antique Latin langage is a stratovolcano in the Gulf of Naples (Italy) about 9 km (5.6 mi) east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. 

It is one of several volcanoes which form the Campanian volcanic arc. Vesuvius consists of a large cone partially encircled by the steep rim of a summit caldera caused by the collapse of an earlier and originally much higher structure.

Mount Vesuvius is best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the burying and destruction of the Roman antique cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and several other settlements. That eruption ejected a cloud of stones, ash, and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 mi), spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing. At least 1,000 people died in the eruption. The only surviving eyewitness account of the event consists of two letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus.

Vesuvius has erupted many times since and is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years. Nowadays, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people living nearby and its tendency towards explosive eruptions (said Plinian eruptions). It is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world.

Vesuvius was formed as a result of the collision of two tectonic plates, the African and the Eurasian. The former was subducted beneath the latter, deeper into the earth. As the water-saturated sediments of the oceanic African plate were pushed to hotter depths in the earth, the water boiled off and caused the melting point of the upper mantle to drop enough to create partial melting of the rocks. Because magma is less dense than the solid rock around it, it was pushed upward. Finding a weak place at the Earth's surface it broke through, producing the volcano.

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau