Saint-Gothard is a pass

The saint in this title is a mountain crossing. The name belongs to an Alpine route and to the hospice built on it — a shelter for travellers, of the kind that took a patron's name and kept it after everyone had stopped thinking of the patron. The picture's subject is a person of rank at that shelter, and the record files it accordingly: Landscapes, Rural, Mountain, with no religious heading anywhere on the entry.

Why it is in this catalogue

Because the title contains the word saint. This collection keeps the toponyms and labels them rather than dropping them, on the principle that a reader who searched for a place is better served by an entry that says so than by silence. Mountain passes, hospitals, canals, harbours and streets make up a large share of what the word catches.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1818 and gives the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France as its location. The dimensions are 32 x 23 cm — very small, the size of a cabinet picture rather than a history painting, which for a subject involving a named public figure is worth noticing. The style is given as Romanticism and the nationality as French; the measured colour family is brown.