Thomas Jones (painter)

Thomas Jones (* 1742 in Wales ; † 1803 there ) was an English painter. In a short creative period around 1780 he came up with peculiar oil sketches with which he was far ahead of his time.

life and work

The student of the landscape painter Richard Wilson went to Italy in 1776. In 1779 he met his future companion Maria Monke from Copenhagen in Rome . Another year later they move to Naples together . It was not until 1782 that Jones came to some customers with the help of the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and because of a visit that Goethe's later drawing teacher "the great" Philipp Hackert paid to him. Of course, he only supplies them with the usual idylls - he could not expect those works that were created during the lonely and unsuccessful time, mostly showing houses or a wall in Naples and have the character of magical still lifes. But it is precisely because of this work that experts consider him to be an ingenious open-air painter and even a forerunner of constructivism .

After the death of his father, who left him with a substantial inheritance, Jones and his wife returned to England in 1783, where they initially lived in London . “Jones exhibits paintings at the Royal Academy that copy the style of Richard Wilson or Francesco Zuccarelli and meet the tastes of current art collectors: Arcadian scenes against forest and rock. Presumably only on one (The Bay of Naples, 1786) appears the facade of a Neapolitan house with a waving woman and fluttering laundry on the balcony parapet at the edge of the picture. There is no indication that he ever exhibited the oil sketches from Naples. "

After the death of his older brother and a further inheritance, Jones takes over the Pencerrig family estate in Radnorshire . He becomes a wealthy, satisfied landlord who only rarely paints - and paints mediocre. "It's a shame: the first painter in art history to see landscapes made by humans unexplained - no, there is a more fitting word for it: who saw through them -, also an unnoticed ancestor of the romanticism of ruins in the 19th century, is becoming a craftsman again because he now lives under pleasant circumstances. "

“It was not until 1954, inspired by the appearance of the memoirs, that Jones' descendants gave Christie's auction house half a hundred watercolors and oil sketches, none of which sold more than £ 20 at the time. In the summer of 2010, Sotheby's auctioned one of them, a watercolor from the Egeria grotto near Rome, for £ 229,250. The wall in Naples was acquired by the National Gallery in 1993 and thus withdrawn from an art market, which is now just as crazy as it is in many other markets. "

literature

• AP Oppé (Ed.): Memoirs of Thomas Jones , The Walpole Society, Vol. 32 (1946–1948), London 1951
• Lawrence Gowing: The Originality of Thomas Jones , London 1985
• A. Sumner and G. Smith (Eds.): Thomas Jones (1742-1803): an artist rediscovered , New Haven and London 2003
• Paul Werner (d. I. P. Werner Lange ): Sketches in changing light: The painter Thomas Jones and the claim of reality , in: Schriftzüge , Brandenburgische Blätter für Kunst und Literatur, Vol. 14, Issue 1, Potsdam 2012, pages 119-131

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} P. Werner Lange, 2012

Web links

• Houses in Naples, 1782