Thomas Jones, 'A Wall in Naples', about 1782

Thomas Jones’s twelve or so small oil sketches on paper painted in Naples during 1782 have become the best known of all the work that he produced during his seven-year stay in Italy. A Wall in Naples is one of five studies of buildings from high viewpoints, which are considered to be the most remarkable and original work of his career.

Most of Jones’s time in Italy was spent either in the studio, painting commissioned views in oil on canvases of conventional size, or gathering material in sketchbooks, to be worked up, sometimes years later, in watercolour. Few of his works on paper were highly finished and they were not, unlike his larger canvas paintings, the types of idealised ‘views of Italy’ bought by Grand Tourists to be taken back to England.

By the spring of 1782, Jones knew he was facing his last year in Italy. In 1779, he had set up house with Maria Moncke in Naples, where she bore him two daughters, and although they lived frugally, money was running out. Looking out from various windows or flat roofs, catching oblique views of warehouses, tenements and churches, Jones seems suddenly to have sensed the individuality of the buildings of Naples, and was determined to record it. When Jones and his family moved to the Vicolo del Canale, on the hill going up to Capodimonte, he enjoyed exclusive use of the roof terrace, and it was probably here that he painted A Wall in Naples.

Most of Jones’s Naples oils on paper are dated 1782 on the back, some are inscribed with the month as well as the year and a few have titles. A Wall in Naples has neither so it is difficult to place it in the sequence. All the rooftop views are of different sizes and it is possible that Jones cropped some to intensify their impact. A Wall in Naples is the smallest of them, not much larger than a postcard. The shuttered windows, the irregular pattern of scaffolding holes, the patchy cement and the habitual water stain from chamber pots thrown out of the window are not features that can help us to identify the building, but they are the freshly observed details of a particular wall, although Jones may have adjusted some of them to enhance his composition. The sketch is painted from a close viewpoint, probably across the narrow street from Jones’s roof terrace. The rectangle of sky is intensely blue suggesting that it was a very hot day in mid-summer, perhaps the same time as Jones painted Houses in Naples (British Museum, London), which is inscribed August 1782.

Most of Jones’s time was taken up with painting commissioned pictures, many of them large classicising landscape views. There is a huge difference between Jones’s ’studies‘ and his ’Pictures'. For example, Lake Albano (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven USA) is almost six-foot wide and took 41 days to paint. Working in oil on paper on a small scale and directly recording what he alone viewed as a subject, Jones achieves an originality not hinted at in his larger canvases.