Tag: Romantic

A Welshman in Naples: Thomas Jones & the Reason for Art

...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).'...

What the Romantics did for us

A shift in thought almost unrivaled in the development of European civilisation, Romanticism spread its way through every form of culture - sometimes like a delicate mist, seeping into the psyche, other times bursting forth with volcanic vigour. Today we still live in the hangover of this revolution of thought and, with its developments incorporated into our quotidian existence, it is easy to overlook the seismic influence it had and has on the way we think, act, and create.