Perfection in miniature
A modernist before his time
FEW painters enjoy as much renown per square inch as Thomas Jones (1742-1803). The fame of this Welsh landscapist, forgotten until recently, rests on roughly half a dozen small oil sketches of walls and rooftops in Naples, some of them no larger than a postcard. So modern are they in treatment and atmosphere that many people, seeing them for the first time, have trouble believing they were painted in Italy in the early 1780s.
The most famous, “A Wall in Naples”, has been called “one of the great microcosms of painting”. Though a detailed and beautiful depiction of what Jones might have seen from his hot upper window, the sketch has a flatness and all-over composition that would not have looked out of place among experiments in abstraction 150 years later.
These enigmatic gems are on show in the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff, together with more conventional works, spanning the whole, on-off career of a sporadic genius. It is a fascinating exhibition, put together by Ann Sumner and Christopher Riopelle. In August it travels to Manchester and then London.
The second son of a Welsh landowner, Jones was bound for the church, but money for university ran out when a family patron died, and he turned instead to art. After studying under a landscapist, Richard Wilson, copying and learning to forge his teacher's work, Jones made the obligatory trip to Italy in 1776. He stayed seven years, filling his sketchbook with notations of the land and buildings of Rome and Naples. (You can view the book on a screen in the show.) Although Jones's lively and amusing “Memoirs” reveal him as no recluse, his drawings rarely show people, not even for scale. He was simply no good at, or not much interested in, depicting human form. Discerning eyes have nevertheless seen metaphors of the body in his Naples sketches, with their ambiguous openings and expressive façades.
Jones's formal originality lay in what he did to the picture plane. You will have seen hundreds of 17th- and 18th-century landscapes which draw your eye across a dark foreground to a luminous vanishing point as if looking through a window at an imaginary space. In the Naples sketches, the light falls evenly at the front, as on a curtain. Indeed there is virtually nothing but foreground, no vanishing point, and old-fashioned picture-space is abolished. Once Jones came to see the picture plane so flatly, devoting an entire picture to a wall must have felt perfectly natural.
Did Jones recognise his own originality? His memoir entries for the summer of 1782 are more about the heat and the rent. Commissions were few, and he seems to have felt himself a failure. On returning from Italy, he inherited the family estate and painted only intermittently. Yet traces of his probing, experimental nature—the lighting of the foreground, the sharpening of transitions from light to dark, the all-over patterning—are there to see both before and after Naples. Some innovations come too early, others falter from lack of confidence or peter out through ill luck. With Jones it was probably all three. But a pathbreaker he undoubtedly was.
From the print edition: Books and arts