ARTS
Exhibitions 1
Travels in Italy 1776-1783 (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, till 10 December)
Scenes from a magic land
David Wakefield Thomas Jones, born in 1742, the youn- ger son of a Welsh landowner, belongs to that fairly rare species, the artist squire. Short, stocky and red-faced, he had none of the conventional attributes of the artist. Sir George Beaumont described him as `a little stunted man, as round as a ball, the truest Welsh runt'. In 1763 he had the good fortune to meet and study under Richard Wilson, a fellow Welshman, who taught him the rudiments of landscape painting. Three years later Jones set foot in Italy, the country which, for him as for so many young 18th-century artists, had the effect of the promised land. In the words of his own Journal: 'Every scene seemed antici- pated in some dream. It appeared Magick Land.' Well primed by a classical educa- tion, he paid homage to all the obligatory sites, Tivoli, Lakes Nemi and Albano, producing competent, well-constructed but unoriginal scenes in the manner of Richard Wilson. The master's influence is betrayed in the foliage, the clouds and a preference for broad panoramic views, framed by the curving boughs of a flat-topped pine, that inevitable adjunct of the classical land- scape painter.
It was not in Rome but in Naples (where he arrived in 1780) that Jones discovered his true vocation. There he could forget about all the classical- associations whch seemed to hamper his imagination. All he had to do was to open his window and paint what he saw: the rooftops, crumbling walls, peeling plaster and blank windows of that teeming city. The result is some of the most remarkable paintings of all time. Though small in format, they capture the essence of Neapolitan city life seen not from the comfortable and picturesque dis- tance favoured by the vedutisti but from close quarters in all its squalor and pover- ty. These works are the great revelation in this superb and beautifully presented ex- hibition.
In 1783 Jones returned to England, where he had little luck in selling his paintings. Then six years later his elder brother died and Jones inherited the family estate in Radnorshire. Thereafter he set- tled down to the comfortable life of a country squire, as depicted in the painting by Francesco Renaldi surrounded by his family and painting only for his own amusement. Thus Jones, who achieved his brief moment of greatness in the Neapoli- tan scenes of 1780-83, steps discreetly aside to make way for his contemporaries, artists of greater stature like Cozens, Towne and Pars, most of whom Jones knew in Rome. These artists, as well as the popular view- painters Vanvitelli, Jolli and Busiri, are admirably represented in the exhibition. A few carefully chosen works by Joseph Vernet and Joseph Wright of Derby (in- cluding two masterly drawings of the Col- osseum) add their special note of author- ity. The result is a vivid and comprehensive picture of artistic life in 18th-century Italy focussed on Rome and Naples, where painters, young men on the Grand Tour, bankers, diplomats, shady art dealers and sundry expatriates all congregated.
Life there seems to have been one long party, reaching its climax in the most spectacular event of the year, the fireworks display at the Castel S. Angelo depicted in Joseph Wright's brilliant but rather garish Detail from Thomas Jones's 'An Excava- tion of an Antique Building Discovered in a Cava in the Villa Negroni at Rome' picture. The free mingling of social classes in Rome, at least on public occasions, is clearly illustrated in Vernet's 'Sporting Contest on the Tiber', in which people of high fashion rub shoulders with humble labourers and ragamuffins. The English, however, dominated as at home by the herd instinct, seem to have kept them- selves to themselves, eating and drinking at the same cafés and living in the same quarter near the Spanish steps. This uni- formity extended to the artists' choice of subjects, as they followed in each other's footsteps to the same sites, mostly hal- lowed by classical antiquity or deemed by tradition to be worthy of the artist's atten- tion by virtue of their sublime or pictures- que qualities.
This conscious limitation in the range of natural scenery, though it tended to ex- clude a'great deal from view, for example the peasants and brigands which the 19th- century Romantics found so appealing, did have the advantage of concentrating the artist's mind on certain set subjects. In fact much of the fascination of this exhibition lies in the juxtaposition of a single site painted by two or more artists, enabling us to compare the subtle and important differ- ences of vision and of technique which make up the distinctive physiognomy of a painter. Though they frequently chose the same subject, they rarely approached it from the same angle. A case in point was Ariccia, the picturesque small town in the Roman countryside, surrounded by woods and crowned by the dome of Bernini's church of S. Maria dell'Assunzione. Where Jones was mainly concerned with topo- graphical accuracy on a broad panoramic scale, Cozens achieved a kind of magical poetry by revealing only the top of the dome, as if floating above the woods. Francis Towne created a totally different but equally striking effect by emphasising the volumetric outlines of dark velvety trees contrasted with broad patches of sunlight.
The Grotto of Posillipo, an underground roadway built in Roman times to connect Naples with Pozzuoli, was another favourite subject with these artists; its main feature, the entrance to the tunnel, in- spired some of their most beautiful paint- ings. The climax of the Grand Tour was, of course, Mount Vesuvius. Its frequent and violent eruptions delighted tourists and offered a grandiose spectacle of fire and spewing molten lava which artists risked their lives to study. Thomas Jones attemp- ted this subject, but it was left to Joseph Wright, the master of fire and moonlight, to extract from it the most powerful and majestic images.
Previous page
