This grand plein air oil sketch was made by Thomas Jones in Rome in 1777. Worked rapidly in oil on primed paper, Jones shows one of the interior arcades of the Colosseum, densely vegetated. Jones’s immediate, on the spot study captures the sensation of being in the shaded ruins, with only a segment of the bright Roman sky visible at the top of composition. Nevertheless the viewer is powerfully aware of the beating sun, gently gilding leaves, tiles and the walls of the Coloseum as it penetrates the gloom. These startlingly immediate effects are painted with such frankness and lack of picturesque artifice that they immediately bring to mind Jones’s remarkable series of Neapolitan roofs which he would paint in the Summer of 1782. Jones’s concentrated, atmospheric oil studies such as this, have long been recognised as transformative in the evolution of European plein air landscape painting.
In the autumn of 1770 Thomas Jones recorded in his Memoirs a trip to Gadbridge, Buckinghamshire, the home of his cousin Rice James: ‘made a number of Sketches from the little picturesque Bits round about, as far as St Alban’s, and painted in Oil some Studies of Trees &c after nature.’[1] This is the most substantive reference in Jones’s own writing to his technique of producing studies from nature on primed paper small enough to fit into the lid of a painting-box. This innovative technique became an important feature of his Continental work. Indeed, whilst in Italy, Jones met a number of French, German and Scandinavian artists who were beginning to make use of the on-the-spot oil study, including Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. Peter Galassi has noted that it was Jones and Valenciennes in their shared interest in painting outdoors which: ‘mark[ed] the beginning of a continuous tradition, the importance of which continued throughout the nineteenth century.[2] Jones’s studies, in particular his unusual views of Neapolitan rooftops, display a sensibility and immediacy which make them stand out. As Anna Ottani Cavina pointed out in the recent exhibition in the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris: ‘C’est l’Angleterre qui expérimente la première la réactivité de ces peintres face au paysage italien, de Francis Towne à Thomas Jones et John Robert Cozens jamais aussi audacieux et inventifs qu’en présence de lieux quelconques, découverts au hazard de leurs voyages.’[3]
This oil was evidently painted out of doors in the Summer of 1777: pin holes are visible in the top corners, suggesting it was attached to the lid of Jones’s paint box or portable easel. The sheet is signed and inscribed on the verso ‘No. 6 / A Scene in the Colloseo at Rome / T Jones.’ We know that Jones was drawing in the Colosseum in the Spring of 1777, two consecutive openings in Joens’s Large Italian Sketchbook, now in the British Museum, show Jones working from the shade of a single arcade. In the first study he looks out towards the coffered apse of the temple of Venus and Rome, on the next Jones shows the interior of the Colosseum. Another oil sketch, now in the collection of the Tate, shows a further view, taken from the shade of one of the interior arcades of the Colosseum. This richly worked painting is of identical size to the present work and inscribed on the verso ‘No 7/ A Scene in the Collosseo at Rome/ T Jones’.
The sequential labelling of these two oil sketches suggests that Jones considered them as part of the same campaign. It may well be that Jones labelled his works on return to Britain, perhaps when he was considering some form of publication. It has not been noticed before but around 1780 at least three members of the British artistic community in Rome converged on the Colosseum: Jones, John ‘Warwick’ Smith and Francis Towne. All three made remarkably powerful studies of the ruined arcades of the Flavian amphitheatre, capturing the monumental scale of the Roman remains. But it is Jones alone who shows the extent to which vegetation was reclaiming the building; as such, he brings remarkable pathos to his vision of the ruins of a former civilisation. All three were probably responding to the death of Piranesi in 1778; finding in the fragmentary arcades of the Colosseum actual views in full sympathy with Piranesi’s graphical fantasies.
But it is the verisimilitude of this study, Jones’s inclusion of quotidian details, such as the terracotta tiles on the right of the building that point to Jones’s exceptional departure. In his formal landscapes, such as the great Lake Albano of 1777 and now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, commissioned by the Earl Bishop, Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, Jones maintains all the compositional structures of the classical, Claudean landscape. But in his private, informal oil sketches, Jones strips away the conventional apparatus of the formal landscape and paints with touching immediacy. This oil sketch is one of the boldest, largest and most successful of Jones’s Italian plein air studies. Preserved in exceptional condition, this study has never been mounted on another support, varnished or stretched on canvas, as such it retains an extraordinarily spontaneous and informal effect. As with all Joens’s greatest oil studies, the present sheet remained with his descendants until the 1950s and has not been on the market since it was acquired by Walter Brandt in 1958.
References
- ed. P. Oppé, ‘Memoirs of Thomas Jones, Penkerrig, Radnorshire, 1803’, The Walpole Society, vol.32, 1946-8, p.22.
- P. Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London, 1991, p.18.
- Ed. A. Ottani Cavina, Paysages d’Italie; Les peintres du plein air (1780-1830), Paris, 2001, p.xxvi.
