Notes
This beautiful view by Jones is taken from the area in the basin below the village of Nemi known as I Giardini, the site of the partially executed Temple of Diana. Out of sight to the right was Speculum Diana, a lake, literally identified as 'the mirror of Diana' because of its circular shape and glassy surface. Nemi itself was closely associated with the cult of Diana, taking its name from the famous sanctuary to Diana in nearby Arricia, known as Nemus Dianae.
Thomas Jones, was born at Trefonnen, near Landrindod, Radnorshire, the second of sixteen children born to Thomas Jones, landowner, and his wife (and cousin), Hannah Jones. At the request of his uncle, he attended Jesus College, Oxford, in order to enter the church, but following his uncle's death Jones went to London and in 1761 he enrolled at Shipley's drawing school. By March of 1763, Jones had decided that his apitude was for landscape painting and convinced Richard Wilson (1713-1782) to take him as an apprentice for two years. Following which he established a thriving landscape practice. However, despite his success in London, Jones wished to leave for the continent.
A trip to the continent, and to Italy in particular, to study antiquity, Renassaince culture and art, and to sketch landscape, was considered an important facet of an eighteenth-century artist's education. Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine a century earlier had sought to depict the features and sights of the Italian landscape and capture the effects of light. Throughout the eighteenth century, artists from across Europe came to Italy and sketched the same landmarks and views and visited the same ruins and cities. These sketches, in pencil, watercolour and oil, executed en plein air and in the studio, often provided the basis and inspiration for future compositions and commissions once the artist had returned home.
Jones had long desired to travel to Italy, 'a favourite project that had been in agitation for some years, and on which my heart was fixed' (A.P. Oppé, ed. 'Memoirs of Thomas Jones', Walpole Society, XXXII, 1946-1948, p. 37). His desire to visit Italy may have been heightened by the direct example of his master Wilson, whose artistic success had been assured by the Italian scenes he painted on his return to England following some six years in Rome in the 1750s, and whose Italian sketches and studies Jones had studied and copied during his artistic apprenticeship. However, for years his trip to the continent had been thwarted by mounting debts and his parents' disapproval of the scheme and it was not until October 1776, when he was approaching his thirty-fourth birthday, that Jones, having overcome these obstacles, set out for Italy via France.
Jones was greatly affected by the changing landscape and light as he travelled through France to Italy. Christopher Riopelle identifies an oil sketch of Montmelian in Savoy (private collection) where Jones visited on 2 November 1776, as a turning point in Jones' artistic development:
'Detailed and densely worked, the sheet registers the artist's awakening delight at the complexity and animation of a sublime mountain landscape of a kind and on a scale he could not have found in his native Wales. It marks a milestone in his conception of the expressive possibilities of landscape.'
(C. Riopelle, 'Thomas Jones in Italy', Thomas Jones - An artist Rediscovered, ed. Ann Sumner and Greg Smith, New Haven and London, 2003, p. 49).
Travelling down through Italy, with a brief stay in Florence, Jones finally arrived in Rome on Wednesday, 27 November 1776. In his lively and informative diaries, Jones touchingly refers to the influence of his teacher, when expressing his joy at travlling through Italy and entering Rome, the
'new and uncommon Sensations I was filled [with] on my first traversing this beautiful and picturesque Country... It appeared Magick Land - In fact I had copied so many Studies of the great Man, & my Old Master, Richard Wilson... that I insensibly became familiarized with Italian Scenes, and enamoured of Italian forms' (op. cit., p. 55).
The small Roman population of about 150,000 contained a large number of artists, architects and sculptors, both native and foreign, who sought patronage among the noble courts, religious confraternities and the distinguished and wealthy vistors for whom Rome was the pinnacle of their Grand Tour (on only his second day in Rome, Jones met the Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III). In the 1770s, Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787) and Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) presided over the artistic scene, and British and Irish artists congregated at the English Coffee House in the Piazza di Spagna.
Jones worked assiduously, filling sketch books with studies of sites both within and without the city walls. He had first visited Lake Nemi in December 1776 and returned in April 1777 with William Pars (1742-1782), Henry Tresham (1751-1814) and Thomas Hardwick (1752-1829), and embarked upon a sustained campaign of sketching around Genzano, Nemi and Albano. Many of Wilson's most successful compositions were based on sketches of this area and Jones' diaries reveal that he was aware of the artistic heritage of the region, recording on 20 April that he:
'went to make Sketches about the Lake of Nemi - particularly a large Plane tree on the Edge of the Water call'd the Arbor Santa, which has a hollow within that I believe w'd contain a dozen persons & I was told here that my Old Master Wilson when in this country made use of it as a Study to paint in' (op. cit p. 58).
Jones' watercolour sketch of Lake Nemi looking towards Genzano (1777; fig. 1, The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester), recalls Wilson's views from the Capuchin Convent, and is marked with topographical, colour and date notes, notes which became a feature of his Italian sketches. Jones' Nemi sketches later became the basis for one of his highly finished classical landscape paintings, Lake Nemi, commissioned by his most important patron in Italy, Frederick Augustus Hervey (1730-1803), the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, which he began painting in 1780, by which time he had moved south to Naples (1782; fig. 2, private collection). The pendant to this picture shows Lake Albano at Sunset.
The present picture is typical of many of Jones' most successful small scale Italian sketches, employing the central motif of a simple structure, worn over the centuries to become a natural part of the landscape, with only a single, humble figure. The composition is dominated by the towering hills, their size exagerrated by the contrasting play of light and shade. The subject shows Jones' predilection for sketching understated and unassuming subjects and views as opposed to the more obvious and famous sites of the eighteenth century.
This picture was painted in 1785, following Jones' return to England in 1783. Such later oils are generally larger and more highly finished than those produced in Italy. Furthermore, none was a commission, and following his death, they remained in the hands of his family, so it is likely that these later compositions were painted for his own pleasure and enjoyment. As Greg Smith concludes in his discussion on the raison d'etre underlining these post-Italy momentoes:
'Moreover, as the client as well as the artist, Jones had nobody to please but himself and it would be surprising if he were not to invest his subjects with personal memories.' (op. cit. p. 82).
It is this element of personal involvement which makes this picture particularly appealing. It was given by Jones' descendant Jane Evan-Thomas to the current owner in 1982.
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