Charles-François LACROIX dit LACROIX de MARSEILLE

It evokes one of the many ships belonging to shipping companies docking all over the world at the time, which the artist must have come across on his travels.

Similarly, the presence of the two men smoking pipes and wearing turbans is symbolic of the exchanges and relations with Eastern countries, which were increasingly important in the 18th century, and from which the taste for Turqueries was to emerge. These landscapes are thus the result of assembling motifs worked on "in situ", in Rome or elsewhere in Italy, and then painted in the studio, like the slender Genoese tower or the castle with its rounded walls reminiscent of that of Saint Angelo. He brought them together and used them over and over again to create an ultimately imaginary composition, following the growing fashion for Italian 'caprices' at the time. It was a genre that allowed him to marry nature and culture, to compare the eternal beauty of the landscape with the more ephemeral beauty of human constructions.