Pierre-Louis De la Rive

In 1773, after attending courses in Natural Philosophy taught by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, he gave up his legal studies but had great difficulty convincing his father to allow him to pursue a career in the fine arts.

Eventually, he was able to take lessons from the landscape painter, Nicolas Henri Joseph de Fassin, who came from Liège.

After a brief stay in Mannheim, he enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he came under the tutelage of Giovanni Battista Casanova, who introduced him to the work of Claude Lorrain and the early Italians.

Once there, he took Casanova's advice and began painting in a manner that would later be called en plein aire.

During an eighteen-month stay in Rome, he worked with Ducros, Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours and Giovanni Battista Canova,[1] making copies in museums, painting outdoors and developing a less rigorous representational style.