Vue de Socoa près de Saint Jean de Luz

Original drawing in watercolor and pencil.
View of Socoa, a seaside resort famous for its beaches, in the bay of Saint Jean de Luz.
This watercolor drawing was later added to a set of landscapes in an amicorum album among engravings, lithographs, drawings, and wash. Executed in the first quarter of the 19th century, these drawings and prints give a panorama of the major towns and resorts appreciated by the European aristocracy (as here Socoa), but also the places that mark the "Grand Tour" An obligatory journey of the post-Napoleonic nobility who came to Italy to make an artistic and bucolic pilgrimage.