Victor-Jean Nicolle (French, 1754-1826)
A Coastal Capriccio

Victor-Jean Nicolle trained in Paris at the École Royale Gratuite de Dessin, the free drawing school founded in Paris by Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724-1806). Nicolle won the Grand Prix de Perspective in 1771 and, after graduating, he entered the architectural studio of Louis François Petit-Radel (1739-1806). Under the First Empire, Radel became Inspector General of civil buildings, a role with considerable responsibility, and his architectural legacy includes the Abbatoirs Roule, one of the five monumental slaughterhouses of Paris built under Napoleon I, among other accomplishments. Nicolle’s architectural specialism and training was put to great use during his lengthy sojourns in Rome, which appear to have been between 1787-1798 and 1806-1811.

Often filled with anecdotal detail, Nicolle’s drawings from his Italian period are almost all rigorously accurate in their topography. They are, as such, important documentary evidence of the appearance of the sites he visited, many of which have changed significantly over the subsequent centuries. Like many artists in Rome before him, Nicolle was also inspired by Hubert Robert and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s celebrated capricci, and drew a number of his own imagined landscapes, subterranean scenes and classical interiors, demonstrating an originality that comparatively few of his contemporaries attained. Nicolle would generally make his topographical drawings ‘sur le motif’ in pen and ink, which he would then finish with watercolour in his studio.