By the second half of the eighteenth century, British painting had been transformed by the Welshman Richard Wilson, he had become preeminent in the genre that would come to define British art for the next two centuries – landscape. Before the mid-eighteenth century, the countryside was thought of as something at once functional and inconvenient, it was working land that provided for the table and trade, and it was the vaguely threatening and dangerous hinterland between the cities and market towns full of poorly maintained roads, thieves robbers, and the rural poor. Wilson was one of the first generation of British romantics who realised the beauty and wonder inherent in rolling hills, open vistas, and dank woodlands. It is Wilson’s legacy that gave us Turner and Constable, Nash and Hockney.
That is not to say the father of British landscape painting owed nothing to Europe, in fact, Italy and France played just as central a role in Wilson’s painting as his native Wales. French masters Claude Loraine and Nicholas Poussin had taken the landscapes of the Italian peninsular for the backdrops of their allegorical and mythological subjects, setting their Gods and nymphs in the golden glow of the Roman campagna and the Amalfi coast masquerading as ancient Greece or Troy. Wilson’s initial efforts were to emulate these forefathers, until the figures of myth began to drop away leaving only increasingly frank and realistic depictions of mountains and valleys just as characterful as Aneas or Dido.
In 1763 another young Welshman, fresh from abandoning an Oxford degree in Theology, arrived in London to seek tutelage from Wilson. Even today the London-Welsh club together like ex-pats the world over, so it is no surprise that Wilson appears to have warmed to his fellow Welshman immediately and took him on as an apprentice. Thomas Jones (the name is…not unusual), was born in the wilds of Mid Wales in 1742 to a landowner of middling status, by 1765, under the guidance of Wilson, Jones was already exhibiting landscapes in the ‘grand manner’ of Claude and Poussin at the Society of Arts (which three years later would become the famous Royal Academy of Arts).
It is at this point I must tell you that Jones’ works in the ‘grand manner’ are not particularly good. Whilst respected in his day and certainly competent by any measure, tastes and styles have moved sufficiently far away from those of late eighteenth-century London that now the melodrama and atmospheric skies struggle to hide the flaws in perspective, proportion, and composition. Take, for example, his large ‘history’ painting based on a poem by Thomas Gray, The Bard (1744) shows the titular moment that the last bard in Wales, those keepers of the flame of Celtic culture, places a curse on Edward I’s invading English army before throwing himself to a watery grave, the bodies of other slain bards lie around. It is a compelling subject, speaking to the growing fascination with the ancient history of our island, the druidic origins of the Welsh, and the mystery of sites like Stonehenge (which Jones conveniently relocates to the North Welsh coast), and it is rendered in a dramatic and imposing manner, with its wheeling birds and flaming skies. However, the podgy, ruddy-faced, white-bearded hero of the tale fails to evoke a good deal of pathos, the green-skinned corpses look a little too well arranged, and the invading army is shown so much in the minute distance that any sense of menace is nullified. All of the players here add nothing to the story the landscape and weather are telling, in fact, you could keep the title, remove all the figures, and the painting would be just as effective in evoking a mood.
So, Jones can do scene painting, but not the actors. This would not be much of an article if it stopped there, and thankfully an extraordinary thing happens to Jones in the following years, when he leaves these shores and makes an extended visit to Italy. The country was still the mecca for European artists of all disciplines, the French state, via the Prix de Rome, paid for writers, composers, painters, and sculptors, to stay a year in the eternal city under the assumption that taking the airs and seeing the ruins would improve their work. A trip to Italy was vital for any artist in order to enter the maturity of their career. The same was repeated with Americans and Paris in the early twentieth century. However, Jones had already been wallowing in the Roman influence back in London, he’d learned the ways of the ‘grand manner’ and knew his myths and emperors, so what could Italy offer him?
Whilst he spent some time in Rome, Naples was where Italy wove itself into Jones’ art and not in the way that anyone could have anticipated. To meet the commissions of clients back at home he continued to produce mediocre landscapes of the Apennines and lakes, but what makes him a singular artist for me are a series of small oil paintings never intended for public exhibition or sale. They concern the view from his rented apartment in Naples, or rather views, as they each seem to capture a different glimpse of the cityscape. Amazingly for this period, there are no people and no clear subject in these paintings. No Gods, Goddesses, nymphs or Emperors. No towering mountains or grand lakes, no stormy skies or arcadian groves. Instead, we have dust, grit, grime, and decay.
Wall in Naples (1782) is harshly cropped, any sense of three-dimensional space is negated by the cutting off of the ends of the wall and the almost complete lack of shadow. We don’t see the ground and get only a sliver of deep, but empty, blue sky. This painting is entirely about surface and Jones revels in that sweet managed decay that one finds right along the Mediterranean. Here and there yellowed brickwork appears through dropped plaster, dark pockmarks show where beams and timbers used to extend and, in the centre, the shabby door to the tiny balcony offers just a hint at the life within, the washing slung over the railing. In Buildings in Naples from the same year, we find the domesticity of another marked and bruised building is contrasted with the grandeur of domed churches in the distance, but all the charm belongs to the yellow doors and shutters that contrast with the blue Neopolitain sky. It almost feels like Jones is foreshadowing the abstract modernists of the early twentieth century with these works – the flatness of the Cubists, the hard lines and squares of colour of Piet Mondrian, and the gritty urbanity of the Camden Town Group, all appear to germinate in this odd little group of private works.
If you’re looking for an essay in pure form, a nearly abstract arrangement of shapes, then look no further than The Cappella Nuova outside the Porta di Chiaia (1782). A dark shadow falls over the foreground whilst rising up behind is the gorgeous hemispherical dome of the cappella. Another artist would have shown us the grand street frontage, no doubt making illusions to the Pantheon in Rome, and the finished work would have adorned the drawing room at Chatsworth or Holkham, but not Jones. By giving us the back street view, the wrong side of the tracks, he unlocks for us a much greater sense of the reality of eighteenth-century Naples and at the same time produces an arrangement of forms that engage the eye and capture an atmosphere far more than any formal classical facade.
I first saw these works some years ago and found their modernism startling even then, but more recently I have come to think of them as far more than curious forerunners. The core reason for the visual arts, as I see it, is the unceasing desire to have others see through our own eyes, the impossible wish for even just one other living soul to see exactly as we see, even if only for a moment. It is what connects the illuminators of the Lindisfarne gospels to the utopian modernists of the mid-twentieth century. To offer up a sensation of the world and life in its entirety to another who will comprehend it totally and wholly in the same terms is, of course, not something that can ever be achieved, but what keeps us making art, and what will always keep us making art, are the times we get close to this impossible task.
The works that touch us the most are nearly always the ones that, for a lightning moment, allow us to see (through a glass darkly, nonetheless) from another’s eyes. As I well know, this often comes many weeks, months, or even years later, not when the painting is in front of you on the gallery wall but rather when you see or perceive something in the real world and realise at that moment that you are seeing it, and comprehending it, in the terms of another, in the terms of a painter who died two centuries ago.
This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life, I saw Dedham Vale in Suffolk through the eyes of Constable, I began to see Provance as van Gogh saw it, for a moment the shallow waves of the Mediterranean sea appeared like Derain’s colourful brush strokes, I saw the neolithic sites of Wiltshire as put down on paper by Paul Nash, and most bizarrely of all, I got a flash of how Cézanne saw landscape whilst on a drive in Monmouthshire. It can strike at any moment, regardless of location, it simply takes a concord of external and internal conditions. So it was that I found myself in the Languedoc region of South West France last week, where I could not help but see the cracked dry plaster, the shuttered, people-less houses, and sunbaked streets through Thomas Jones. The hot quietness, the layers of human history, the textures so foreign to the British isles yet absolutely ubiquitous in the south of Europe, all of it was how he saw it in the 1780s, and whilst it is impossible to fully articulate in words these moments of parallel vision, once they happen, your terms of reference are forever slightly shifted. It is the wonder of art, and what keeps me coming back.
Jones himself returned to Wales at the end of the 1780s and virtually gave up painting. He had been moderately successful and was well regarded in the RA but he appears to have been homesick for the rolling green hills of Builth Wells and returned to the family estate he had inherited. He spent the final decades of his life as a gentleman farmer, managing his estate and tenants well, and occasionally raising his pencil to sketch the new agricultural developments. He died in 1803, at the beginning of a century that would make the Romantic visions of landscapes and myths its forte. His mentor, Richard Wilson, had begun the captivation of British painters with landscape, but Jones would slide increasingly into obscurity, a provincial artist of provincial talent. It has only been in more recent years that Jones has been rediscovered for the master that he was, a painter who very nearly stumbled into the universal quality of the abstract two centuries before it would become taken up by the modernists. These simple little paintings prove that effective and impactful art doesn’t have to make grand statements or huge gestures, a clarity of vision, a nuance of execution, and a common understanding can make even an old Neapolitan wall into a masterpiece.
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Morgan Haigh 