Antonio Mancini, 'On a Journey', about 1903

An old man, alone and slightly lost, sits in a train carriage amid the paraphernalia of travel, including a furled umbrella behind his right shoulder and a hat box at his feet. The effects of an interminable journey, where boredom is tempered by mild anxiety, play across his wrinkled face. His bright eyes search out the viewer’s as if we have just entered the carriage and he sees in our fleeting companionship the promise of relief from tedium. The painting is a character study derived from a specifically modern experience – a trip by rail. Mancini’s father, Paolo, was the model for the figure. He often sat for his son in the years around 1900 when the younger Mancini’s mental health was frequently precarious. Paolo had been a tailor in Naples but in old age he kept a benevolent eye on his son and, a bit of an actor, made himself available to pose for picture after picture. Most of them, like this one, were executed amid props in the artist’s Roman studio.

The intensely worked surface of the painting is typical of Mancini’s work in these years. Thick layers of paint pile up not necessarily in the most expressive areas of the image like the sitter’s face and hands, which are relatively thinly painted, but rather in subsidiary parts like his clothing. There, the dark pigment is so clotted that it creates a crust on the canvas. The animation such paint application gives to Mancini’s surfaces when seen in real life – as opposed to photographs where light catching on the most encrusted parts often makes the images difficult to read – was appreciated by many contemporary viewers as a sign of Mancini’s modernity and avant-garde indifference to academic norms.

One such enthusiast was Mancini’s London patroness, Mary Hunter. She once stated that her goal in life was to spend all of her husband Charles Hunter’s considerable fortune. In 1904 she arranged for the painting to hang in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, for which she herself gave it the title in French under which it appeared in the catalogue: En voyage. Soon afterwards it was acquired by Hugh Lane, and Mancini wrote to his friend John Singer Sargent to say how pleased he was that it belonged to the Dublin-born collector. A few years later, Mancini painted Lane’s portrait in Rome, and in 1907 Lane invited the artist to visit London and Dublin to paint portraits. On a Journey came to the National Gallery with Lane’s bequest in 1917. Today, display is shared between the National Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.