View of the Castello di San Giuliano, near Trapani, Sicily

Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont

National Gallery of Art

Steep, rocky cliffs span the right two-thirds of this horizontal painting in front of a distant landscape to the left. A brown stone fortress or castle, with crenellated walls and few visible windows, is built at the edge of the cliff at the center of the image. To the right and higher up on the hill are more reddish-brown stone ruins with tall, narrow towers, also partially overgrown with vegetation. Closer to us and in the bottom right corner of the painting, a person with light skin wearing a brimmed hat and tan and brown clothing stands among several goats and looks out to the left. Some goats graze or stand on the rocky path near the person, while others are scattered farther across the sloping, grassy terrain. The rocky hillside is dotted with patches of green vegetation and shrubs. The base of the cliffs fade in the near distance and beyond them is a wide, hazy valley or plain under a blue sky filled with soft, white clouds. Streaks over mountains along the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition, suggest distant rain. A black mark in the lower right corner could be the artist’s initials, JS, conjoined as a monogram.