A pair of architectural capriccios, the first known as 'L'Agréable rencontre'

Pierre-Antoine Patel was the son of the landscape painter Pierre-Patel. Like his father, Pierre-Antoine specialized in classical landscapes strongly influenced by Claude Lorrain and worked independently of the Académie Royale. Only about fifty paintings by him are known today, though this is supplemented by a number of gouaches which generally date to the final fifteen years of his life.

Something of the pair's early provenance can be gleaned from a pair of summary sketches made by Gabriel de Saint Aubin in his copy of the sale of the miniaturist Johann Anton de Peters held in March 1779 (fig. 1). The first painting was also engraved with minor differences to the background by Pierre-Paul Benazech under the title 'L'Agréable rencontre', with the print issued in both French and English text versions. The inscription on the print gave the painting simply to ‘Patel’, which likely accounts for the confusion introduced by Charles Le Blanc in the mid-nineteenth century. Le Blanc wrongly attributed the painting to one ‘B. Patel le jeune’, presumably the artist Benoit Nicolas Patel (b. 1701).