Thomas Jones

Exhibited by Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd

Material Oil on laid paper

Dimensions 41 x 28 cm (16 ⅛ x 11 1/16 in)

Status Vetted

About the Work

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 Colosseum 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.

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Provenance

Thomas Jones;
Elizabetha Dale (1781-1806), daughter of the above;
Mrs Elphinstone Farrier, by inheritance;
Farrier sale, Christie’s, 2 July 1954;
Colnaghi, 1958;
W. A. Brandt, acquired from the above, 15th October 1959 (20 gns);
And by descent