Thomas Jones 1742–1803
NG 6544 
A Wall in Naples

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

? 1782

Oil on paper laid on canvas, 11.4 × 16 cm (4½ × 6⁵⁄₁₆ in.)

Provenance

After the artist’s death, passed to his younger daughter Elizabeth Francesca who, having married Captain John Dale, died in 1806 leaving no surviving children; passed to Captain Dale,¹ then by descent through Rose Adams (his daughter by his second marriage) to his great‐grandson Dr Adams, by whose widow² sold Christie’s 28 July 1955 (as 'An Italian house’, one of three in lot 6, £14), bt Agnew’s; purchased from Agnew’s by Lady Ashton (Madge Garland, Royal College of Art, Department of Fashion and Design) December 1955; sold by her, Christie’s 23 March 1979 (88, £5500), bt Appleby Brothers for Mrs Jane Evan‐Thomas, widow of Commander Charles Evan‐Thomas DSO, RN, of Pencerrig;³ purchased from Mrs Evan‐Thomas through Agnew’s by the National Gallery 1993.

Exhibited

London, Marble Hill House, and Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Thomas Jones, 1970 (65, as ‘Window in Naples’); New York, Museum of Modern Art (touring to Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, and Art Institute of Chicago), Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, 1981–2 (27, repr. on cover of catalogue); Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Travels in Italy 1776–1783, based on the Memoirs of Thomas Jones, 1988 (105); Washington, National Gallery of Art (touring to Brooklyn Museum, New York, and St Louis Art Museum), In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open‐Air Painting, 1996–7 (10, repr. with colour detail p. 123).

Literature

J.A. Gere, ‘An Oil‐Sketch by Thomas Jones’, British Museum Quarterly, XXI, no. 4, 1959, pp. 93–4; J.A. Gere, ‘Thomas Jones; An Eighteenth‐Century Conundrum’, Apollo, XCI, 1970, p. 470, fig. 4; Lawrence Gowing, The Originality of Thomas Jones, London 1985, pp. 47, 63; Francis Hawcroft, Travels in Italy 1776–1783, based on the Memoirs of Thomas Jones, exh. cat., Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 1988, particularly pp. 89–92; Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open‐Air Painting and the Classical‐Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London 1991, p. 34, plate 35.

Technical Notes

Cleaned and restored on acquisition. The support is buff‐coloured paper which has been laid down onto hardboard. [page 187][page 188]There are losses in the paper, each c. 1.5 × 1 cm, at either end of the bottom edge. Their symmetry suggests that they result from some method of holding the paper onto a support while the painting was done. The paint is otherwise in good condition, though the edges may have been trimmed.

Discussion

When Jones arrived in Italy in 1776, at the start of what was to be a seven years’ sojourn, he saw the landscape through the eyes of his master, Richard Wilson. In December 1776 he wrote in his Journal that ‘on my first traversing this beautiful and picturesque country – Every scene seemed anticipated in some dream – It appeared Majick Land.’⁴ Through studying Wilson’s landscapes, he had ‘insensibly become familiarized with Italian scenes, and enamoured of Italian forms’:⁵ now he saw the ‘classic ground’ for himself,⁶ and began in his turn to translate such subjects as Lake Albano and Lake Nemi into oils and watercolours.⁷

Of all Jones’s work in Italy, the twelve or so small oils on paper painted in Naples during 1782 have become the best known. Of these, five studies of buildings from high viewpoints, of which the Wall in Naples is one, have been justly singled out as the most original work of his entire career: and it is on these that attention is concentrated here. Working in oil on small sheets of paper (later stuck to cardboard for support) was not new to Jones in 1782. He had worked in this way in the late 1770s, in Wales, painting (among other things) two astonishingly direct views of the Radnorshire landscape as seen from the terrace of Pencerrig, his family home;⁸ and he occasionally worked in oil on paper in Rome around 1777–8.⁹ But most of his time in Italy (apart from the diversions which make his Memoirs such entertaining reading) was spent either in the studio, painting commissioned views in oil on canvases of conventional size,¹⁰ or gathering material in sketchbooks, to be worked up later (sometimes years later) in watercolour.

When Jones chose to work in oil on paper, it seems to have been primarily for his own pleasure, and without much premeditation. Working in this way, there was no need to encumber himself with an easel; the paper he worked on was usually small enough to fit into the lid of his painting‐box. Few of these works were highly finished. None was exhibited nor (it seems) shown to the occasional Grand Tourist who visited his painting‐room: the ‘English cavalieri’, Jones called them, mostly youths wanting orthodox views of Italy to take back to the shires, though once William Beckford called ‘with all his Retinue’ (while Jones was out).¹¹ Few if any of Jones’s Naples subjects in oil on paper conformed to accepted notions of ‘views’; by no contraction of the imagination could the Wall in Naples be called a veduta.

It seems that Jones did not take up his former habit of working occasionally in oil on paper until he was about halfway through the three years (from May 1780 to August 1783) that he spent in Naples. A previous four‐month visit (September 1778 to January 1779) had largely been devoted to sketching excursions – to Vesuvius, Pompeii, Sorrento and Baja – with fellow‐artists; he seems to have made no oils on paper then. Why then should he have reverted to this practice during 1782? Changes in his circumstances may partly account for it. First, he had set up house in mid‐1779 with Maria Moncke, who accompanied him to Naples and bore him two daughters there; he now led a more domesticated life, on a shorter rein, less free to explore the countryside in search of material. Secondly, from May 1782 until his return home, he repeatedly had to move from one set of lodgings to another, sometimes having to find a separate painting‐room in which to work. At the time, these moves (outlined below) must have seemed vexatious: but with each move, Jones was presented with a different set of windows, or a different flat roof, which offered a fresh slant on the city, its suburbs and its hillsides. More indefinably, a third circumstance no doubt contributed to Jones’s wish to record direct impressions of the city, and that was the knowledge that his time there was running out. On arrival in Naples in May 1780, he had ‘made a Calculation’ (he was careful about money, and kept exact accounts)¹² that he had enough commissions on hand to support him in a ‘frugal Stile of living’ for three more years.¹³ By the spring of 1782, he knew he was facing his last year in Italy. Looking out from various windows or from flat roofs, catching oblique views of warehouses, tenements and churches, he seems suddenly to have sensed the individuality of the buildings of Naples, and determined to record it.

Having arrived in Naples, Jones and Maria took a two‐year lease of an apartment on the second floor of ‘a large new built house’ whose ground floor was occupied by warehouses; the house faced ‘the Dogana del Sale or Custom house for salt’ on one side, and on the other overlooked the crowded and noisy port of Naples.¹⁴ Their apartment was large enough for Jones to be able to use one room as a painting‐room, where he worked on his commissioned canvases. He mentions, almost in passing, that the lease included the use of the ‘Lastrica or Terras Roof’;¹⁵ and it was presumably from there that Jones painted the first of his Naples oils on paper, Buildings in Naples, with the North‐East Side of the Castel Nuovo, dated ‘Jan 7 1782’ on the back.¹⁶ As Anthony Blunt notes, this face of the Castel Nuovo was to be the principal subject of drawings by Géricault in 1815–16 and by Ruskin in 1841;¹⁷ but while both Géricault and Ruskin could stand back to select viewpoints further from the subject, thus allowing a wider view, Jones’s viewpoint was necessarily limited by the area of the flat roof. He makes no attempt to reduce the presence of the building which interrupts his distant view of the ancient fortress and of the domes of two churches. This neighbouring building was probably close to his own: close enough for him to depict the whitewash on its area of flat roof, and the washing hung out to dry on its walls.

Most of the Naples oils on paper are dated ‘1782’ on the back; some are inscribed with the month as well as the year, and a few with titles. The Wall is neither dated nor inscribed; thus its place in the sequence can only be surmised. After the Castel Nuovo view painted in January, there appear to be no rooftop views until the spring of 1782, when he painted Buildings in Naples (fig. 1)¹⁸ and Rooftops, Naples (fig. 2),¹⁹ each dated April 1782. As Gowing observed, Jones does not seem to have realised the opportunities for view‐painting offered by a flat roof until the two‐year lease of his apartment near the port was within weeks of expiry;²⁰ then, as Buildings in Naples and Rooftops, Naples both show, his perception of the utter strangeness of the ordinary, unidentifiable buildings of the city had intensified. Buildings in Naples inspired a deservedly well‐known passage in Gowing’s vindication of his chosen title, The Originality of Thomas Jones,²¹ drawing attention (among [page 190]other things) to Jones’s instinct for ‘mathematic precision’ in design. Here it may be noted that all the rooftop views are of different sizes. It is possible that Jones cropped some of them to intensify their impact. Rooftops, Naples, for instance, measures 14.3 × 35 cm, its odd size increasing the sense of an unusual viewpoint, and its half‐seen, half‐shuttered windows imparting a curious sense of mystery.

On 3 May 1782 Jones’s lease of the house overlooking the port expired.²² He found less spacious lodgings for himself and his family at ‘Mr Thomas Francis, the English Taylor’s’, in the Chiaia quarter. But he urgently needed a painting‐room in order to complete (and earn money from) various commissions for large oils, particularly the ‘large View of the Lake of Nemi for the Earl of Bristol’ which he had begun in February.²³ From 9 May 1782, he rented ‘a room to paint in’ in the nearby Convent of the Cappella Vecchia,²⁴ quite ‘large and commodious for such a place, and as it was on the ground floor and vaulted above, very cool and pleasant at this Season of the Year – The only window it had, looked into a Small Garden, and over a part of the Suburbs, particularly the Capella Nuova, another Convent, the Porta di Chaja, Palace of Villa Franca, and part of the Hill of Pusilippo, with the Castle of S. Elmo & convent of S. Martini &c. all of which Objects, I did not omit making finished Studies of in Oil upon primed paper.’²⁵ This is the first time that Jones refers in his Memoirs to his newly revived habit of making oil studies on paper. Those dated May 1782 include Houses in Naples²⁶ and The Cappella Nuova outside the Porta di Chiaia. The latter is, after the Wall in Naples, the smallest of his Naples views, but one of the most highly finished of them;²⁷ the view is a close confrontation with the church, looking slightly upwards, and was perhaps taken from the window in Jones’s ground‐floor painting‐room. But before the month was out, Jones was obliged by ‘the Good fathers’ to move from his cool ground‐floor room to an insufferably hot little ‘Cell’ upstairs. An Italian artist (‘my facetious friend D. Luigi Michili’)²⁸ helped him to find an apartment on the third floor of a house in his own street, the Vicolo del Canale, on the hill going up to Capodimonte; and Jones took a year’s lease (until 4 May 1783), which included ‘the exclusive Use of the Lastrica … by which term the flat roofs of the houses in Naples, surrounded by parapet Walls, are called’.²⁹

Jones describes the Vicolo del Canale as ‘a little narrow street’. But from his lastrica he now ‘commanded a view over [a] great part of the City, with the Bay, Mountains of Sorrento & Island of Caproea, – on the other Side, the Rocks, Buildings & Vineyards about Capo de Monte’. On this flat roof, he records, ‘I spent many a happy hour in painting from Nature.’³⁰ From it, as John Gere suggests, he may well have painted the Houses in Naples which is dated August 1782 on the back (fig. 3).³¹ But without a tower or church dome in the background to give us bearings, such buildings are now unidentifiable; used as tenements or warehouses (or both, like the first house he had lived in), they are found throughout Naples. Jones invariably depicts innumerable small square holes in their walls, showing as black against bleached brick which is sometimes whitewashed, sometimes patchily plastered with grey or pinkish cement. While some of these perhaps served a purpose as scaffolding‐holes, as Hawcroft suggests, there are so many holes in Jones’s façades (sometimes even in his shutters) as to suggest that he introduced a great many of them for the sake of the note they contributed to the patterning of the walls.³² Truth to nature need not be entirely literal.

The Wall in Naples is the smallest of all Jones’s oils on paper. It is only fractionally larger than the standard‐sized National Gallery postcard on which it is reproduced; but, in Lawrence Gowing’s words, ‘It is one of the great microcosms of painting, less than five inches by hardly more than six, yet built grandly out of the very stuff of illusion, that stuff of quite finite, yet endless potential.’³³ The shuttered windows, the irregular scattering of ‘scaffolding‐holes’, the patchy cement, the habitual stain of water (from chamber‐pots) thrown out onto the street below, are not identifiable ‘features’. They are almost matched by details in other views (see, for instance, figs. 1 and 2): but not quite matched, for this is a freshly observed view of a particular wall. All that seems certain is that Jones confronted the wall from a close viewpoint – possibly from the flat roof of his house in the Vicolo del Canale, that ‘narrow street’. It also seems likely that the day was very hot. The rectangle of sky at the top is intensely blue; heat seems to strike the wall, intensifying its every detail. It is suggested here that the Wall was painted in midsummer, perhaps about the same time as the work with which it seems to have the closest affinity, the Houses in Naples in the British Museum (fig. 3), which is dated ‘August 1782’.

In Rome a few years earlier, Jones had found the heat in August so oppressive that he took to ‘sitting in my Shirt & thin linnen Drawers without Stockens – with the Windows open – and in this dress I sat down to paint’.³⁴ In Naples, as the summer of 1782 advanced, Jones felt the heat acutely. He conveys the power of the Neapolitan sun vividly in the work so far known just as Naples, and dated simply ‘1782’, in which intense heat blanches a rock face (? near Capodimonte) and the buildings nearby. By mid‐July, he returned from making a few calls ‘almost exhausted having had the scorching beams of the Sun full upon me the whole Way’.³⁵ As the heat intensified, and in the light of what he himself tells us of his habit in Rome, we may imagine Jones stripped down to his shirt and underpants, sitting by open windows, or on flat roofs at those times of the day which permitted shade, painting what confronted him.

Despite the heat, Jones tells us that the year during which he lodged in the Vicolo del Canale (in what he sometimes refers to as ‘my little house at Capo di monte’)³⁶ was ‘by far the most agreeable part of my Time during my Sojourn in Naples’. He became a friend of the draughtsman Giambattista Lusieri (‘Don Titta’), who lodged a few doors away in the same street, having been commissioned by the Queen of Naples to make views of the city.³⁷ In July Jones recounts their excursions together into the countryside: ‘Don Titta being much in the same line of the profession with myself, we spent a great part of our time together in such kind of Scenery, making Studies from Nature, and when fatigued … generally got into the first hedge Tavern that presented itself, for refreshment.’³⁸ Lusieri’s [page 191]minutely observed views of Naples, painted in watercolour, are mostly panoramas, overlooking wide sweeps of the city to the bay; as Jones notes, they were ‘deservedly admired for their Correctness and strict attention to Nature’ (he adds, possibly with a tinge of envy, ‘many of them purchased by Our English Cavaliers’).³⁹

Lusieri introduced Jones to a circle of potential patrons of various nationalities. Feeling that he was now beginning to emerge a little from a ‘Cloud of Obscurity’,⁴⁰ Jones began to search for a painting‐room ‘at the Court end of the Town’; he found two rooms in a house ‘at the back of the Chaja in the Vicolo del Marisciallo de’ Svizzeri’ and, having rented them from December to the following May, moved all his ‘pictures and painting utensils’ there. To get from his painting‐room to his lodgings near Capodimonte he had to walk ‘nearly the whole length of the City, besides up and Down Hill’; but he now had another view over the city. ‘The Windows on each side looked over fruitful Gardens, and commanded a View of many Churches, Convents, Villas and the greatest part of the hill of Pusilippo’;⁴¹ and in the last days of December he ‘began several Studies of the different Scenes & Objects seen from the Windows on both sides, some of which were painted in Oil, & some in Water Colors’.⁴² Only one of his oil studies is dated 1783, a hillside with (?) the Monastery of St Martino, dated April 1783’;⁴³ if he completed others, they are not now known.

One last move remained. The lease of his last painting‐room expired on 4 May 1783, a few months before Jones was ready to depart from Naples for home.⁴⁴ At this point, Sir William Hamilton (who had previously shown little interest in Jones and none in his work) offered him space in the billiard room of his palazzo.⁴⁵ For the last time, Jones moved all his ‘pictures and painting utensils’; for the last time, he observed a fresh view – this time opposite ‘an immense Cavern cut out of the Rock of the Pizzi Falcone, and which I had a full view of from the Windows’. Once more, there were ‘fresh opportunities for copying nature… Indeed I did little else at present, than make such Studies’.⁴⁶ One might reasonably guess that not all the studies he made have survived.

John Gere drew attention in 1959 to the ‘very close parallel’ between the work of Jones and Pierre‐Henri Valenciennes (1750–1819): ‘the oil‐sketches which the Frenchman likewise made for his own instruction and amusement are strikingly like Jones’s in technique and spirit.’⁴⁷ Valenciennes is not mentioned in Jones’s Memoirs; and while Gere has established that the two artists could have met, either in Rome or in Naples,⁴⁸ no evidence that they did meet has since come to light. Peter Galassi 1991 fully discusses and illustrates the oil studies from nature made by Valenciennes, and their influence on later open‐air painting, particularly on the work of Corot.⁴⁹ He observes that whether or not Jones and Valenciennes ever met or saw each other’s work is ‘not [page 192]pressing’: what chiefly makes them remarkable is ‘that their outdoor work marks the beginning of a continuous tradition’.⁵⁰

Concentration here on Jones’s oil studies should not obscure the fact that most of his time was taken up by painting commissioned pictures, many of them large. Between Jones’s ‘studies’ and his ‘Pictures’ there is a huge difference – as comparison of the Wall with the Lake Albano⁵¹ painted for the Earl‐Bishop shows: the latter, almost the size of one of Constable’s ‘six‐footers’, took 41 days and much anguish to paint. Galassi observes that for both Jones and Valenciennes there was an ‘extreme polarity’ between their outdoor and indoor work.⁵² To support himself and his family in Italy, Jones executed oil paintings on canvas which were either commissioned or which he could be reasonably sure would satisfy the demand for views in a classicising tradition. Wilsonian in manner, they lack Wilson’s elegiac vein of poetry; as Ralph Edwards observed in 1970, compared with Wilson’s Italian landscapes, Jones’s canvases are ‘not transfigured by emotion, and the approach to nature is far more staid and objective’.⁵³ Farington noted on 1 April 1798, presumably after seeing some of Jones’s conventional exhibits of oils on canvas: ‘Jones’s landscapes very cold – like China.’⁵⁴ Working in oil on paper on a small scale and directly confronting from windows or rooftops what he alone saw as a subject, Jones’s work achieves an originality not to be guessed at from his canvases.

Notes