Ahead of his time
Laura Gascoigne
Thomas Jones (1742-1803): An Artist Rediscovered
1 n his memoirs, the Welsh painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) attributes the premature death of his fellow artist Nicholas Dail to 'Discontent & despair from the reflection that when all the houses in the Kingdom were full of Pictures . .. there would be no room for any more.' The sad truth is that discontent and despair more often accrue to an artist's family after his death on inheriting a house full of unsold pictures. And such might have been the lot of Jones's two daughters had he not, as a Radnorshire landowner, been in the unusual position of being able to leave each of them a large house. His unsold pictures remained in the family for a century and a half until 14 lots were put up for auc
tion at Christie's in 1954, when a handful of 'oil sketches' of Italian scenes astonished the art world by their modernity. Jones emerged from the Cloud of Obscurity' in which he already complained in his lifetime of being enveloped, and the rest is surprisingly recent history.
Seeing his little oils now at the centre of the National Museum of Wales's exhibition marking the bicentenary of Jones's death, it's hard to comprehend their years of neglect. In explanation, scholars have suggested that as oils on paper they fell between two markets in informal watercolours and formal oils, and that their intense, almost photographic focus on humble subjects — such as the houses opposite Jones's lodgings in Naples — was ahead of its time. This is certainly true. In discovering the picturesque in the humdrum, Jones invented the modern urban landscape. What is patently untrue is that these paintings are 'sketches' in any accepted meaning of the term. Jones called them 'studies' and that is what they are. The infinite care he lavished on them, obvious to the naked eye, is confirmed by the underdrawing revealed by infrared light. No job was too small, no trouble too great for Jones. Into the 4 x 6 ins frame of 'A Wail in Naples' he condensed as much genuine first-hand observation as Canaletto spread thin over a dozen vedute.
Because of his late rediscovery, there's been a temptation to paint him as a romantic failure, but Jones exhibited 50 paintings at the Royal Society of Artists in his lifetime, and even in the competitive Italian Grand Tour market sold enough to keep himself — and the illegitimate family he acquired en route — in Italy for seven years from 1776-83. This major survey exhibition — smaller versions of which will tour to the Whitworth. Manchester and the National Gallery, London — amends the record, resetting the informal studies
for which he is now famous in the context of the formal work for which he was known in his day.
The show features mythological landscapes in the grand manner — including 'The Bard' (1774), Jones's brave bid for a Welsh Sublime – and 'pure landscapes' of Italy and Wales in the manner pioneered by his master Richard Wilson, Welsh father of British landscape painting. In Wales, as in Italy, it's in the little studies in watercolour and oil on paper of local scenes from around the family estate at Pencerrig that Jones really sparkles. Freshness of touch is here combined with a degree of finish that enables us, in 'Sketch in Wales, Pencerrig' (1776), to identify each species of wild flower — foxglove, thistle. elder — in the foreground and have a good guess at the trees behind. Jones was a tree man, as is obvious from the sympathetic attention he pays to each one's individual habit — a sympathy he shared with Mondrian, another student of the geometry of nature who applied its lessons to the four-square urban model. For all their detail, Jones's rural landscapes exhibit the same concise command of tone that transfigures the flatness of those walls in Naples. His training with Wilson began with a year of drawing in black and white on middle-tint paper 'to ground me in the Principles of Light & Shade without being dazzled and misled by the flutter of Colours.' The slog paid off.
There are many ways of wasting artistic talent, but only one thing worth wasting it on: what you think worth doing when nobody else does. If you have talent enough and waste enough of it, history will eventually come round to your point of view. Jones was lucky his work survived, but he was also curiously fortunate in enjoying a lifelong run of professional bad luck. His artistic career was a catalogue of second choices. He had been destined for the Church, but took up art when the uncle paying his Oxford fees died intestate; he planned to train with a portrait painter but couldn't afford it, so finished up with the landscapist Richard Wilson; he went to Italy hoping for a stream of commissions, and found himself in Naples with time on his hands. Instead of chasing work, he began to paint for himself, giving in 'to the immediate pleasure of the Moment'. At the end of a career path of wrong turnings, he came up against a blank sunlit wall in Naples. What he made of that wall was the culmination of a life's achievement that, in its modest way, equals any in art.
Thomas Jones: An Artist Rediscovered is at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff until 10 August and at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester from 22 August to 26 October. The Italian section travels to the National Gallery, London from 12 November to 15 February.
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