Charles Suan, Gentleman in a Landscape with His Dog, 1839, Signed French Romantic Oil on Canvas, Framed

A young man stands at the centre of an open landscape, one hand on his hip, the other holding a gun upright against his leg. He wears a dark green frock coat, a pale grey waistcoat, a black cravat and light trousers, the dress of the late 1830s. His top hat and a folded coat rest on the rock behind him. A brown and white pointer sits at his right, ears forward, looking out of the picture in the same direction as its master. Behind them the ground drops away to a broad valley with a river, fields and distant woods, and above it a heavy sky of grey cloud breaks to blue at the upper right. The face and hands are worked with care, the foliage and sky in broader strokes.

The portrait set outdoors with a gun and a dog was a standard form in French and English painting of the period, a way of showing a man on his own land and at his leisure rather than in a room. The type carried from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth and remained in demand among landowning families throughout the Romantic decades.

Charles Suan was a French painter active in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is documented as the adoptive father of the sculptor Charles Georges Ferville-Suan (1847-1925), who trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and exhibited at the Salon. Beyond that connection and the works bearing his signature, biographical records remain limited. This canvas is signed and dated 1839.

The painting carries old restorations, visible in the photographs, and is presented in a period gilt frame with carved corner ornaments, showing small losses to the gilding.