- Museum number
- Mm,11.63
- Description
-
The Theatre at Miletus with the party crossing in a ferry; one horse and rider, evidently Richard Chandler, is already embarked, to left Nicholas Revett and William Pars, still mounted, are attempting to board, to right in distance ruins with mountains beyond
Pen and black ink with watercolour and gum arabic
- Production date
- 1764
- Dimensions
-
Height: 296 millimetres
-
Width: 471 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- The drawing was engraved by James Newton in 'Ionian Antiquities' Vol II, 1797, Pl 43 and in aquatint by Paul Sandby, published 1780. Three impressions of Sandby's aquatint are in the BM: 1872,0713.457, 1904,0819.788 and 1917,1208.2833
Chandler watches calmly from the ferry while his companions struggle to encourage their nervous horses to step aboard. In his 'Travels in Asia Minor' (see below) he does not mention this difficulty, remarking only that the ferryman was dark skinned before proceeding to describe the impressive remains of ancient Miletus. He recalled the huge building beyond the ferry: "The principal relic of … former magnificence is a ruined theatre, which is visible afar off, and was a most capacious edifice, measuring in front four hundred and fifty-seven feet. The external face of this vast fabric is marble ... The seats ranged, as usual, on the slope of a hill, and a few of them remain. The vaults, which supported the extremities of the semi-circle, with the arches or avenues in the two wings, are constructed with such solidity as not easily to be demolished. The entrance of the vault of substruction, on the left side, was filled up with soil; but we examined that next the river; one of our Armenians going before us with a candle in a long paper lantern. The moment we had crept in, innumerable large bats began flitting about us. The stench was hardly tolerable; and the commotion of the air, with the apprehensions of our attendant, threatened us with the loss of our light".
Miletus - thirty-five kilometres south of Ephesus - was a wealthy port in the first millennium BC with important schools of philosophy and science. The theatre was built in the 4th century BC with a capacity of 5,000. It was enlarged by the Romans to hold 15,000 and used for gladiatorial shows and wild animal fights. By the 4th century AD the silt deposited by the river Maeander had turned what had been open sea to marshland and Miletus lost trade and thus population. It is now some eight kilometres inland.
L. Stainton, British Landscape Watercolours:1600-1860 (BM, exh. cat., 1985):
In 1764 William Pars, aged twenty-two, was commissioned by the Society of Dilettanti (a group of noblemen and gentlemen founded in 1733 whose aims included a furthering of the appreciation of the Antique) to accompany Chandler and Revett's expedition to Asia Minor, in order to record the sites they visited: they were to return in 1766. Hitherto, Pars seems to have practised as a portrait painter and to have aspired to history-painting; there is little evidence of any accomplishment as a topographical or landscape artist before this expedition. His Ionian watercolours are therefore even more remarkable achievements. In them Pars rose to the challenge of his first major commission, developing both the extreme precision necessary in an archaeological draughtsman and a sensitive response of the exotic landscape and its inhabitants. After his death in Italy in 1782 (from an illness apparently contracted from standing in the cold water at Tivoli while sketching) his close friend Thomas Jones wrote that Pars had "an inward bias in favour of Landscape, though brought up to Portrait. . .though in a fit of splean, he would sometimes curse his Fate in being obliged to follow such trifling an Employment; as he called it - it was with the greatest difficulty his Friends could detach him from his favourite Study".
Richard Chandler's account of the expedition, 'Travels in Asia Minor', 1775 (reprinted in abridged form in 1971, with a commentary on Pars's watercolours by Andrew Wilton) describes the expedition's itinerary, while Pars's watercolours (of which seventeen are in the Department) were engraved both in 'Ionian Antiquities' (vol. i, 1769; vol. ii, 1797), published by the Society of Dilettanti, and as aquatints by Paul Sandby between c.1777 and c.1780. The first drawing, Mm,11.63, shown at the Royal Academy's very first exhibition in 1769, depicts members of the expedition boarding the ferry to cross the River Maeander (the Englishmen have grown moustaches like their Turkish companions); the topographical element - the theatre at Miletus - has been relegated to the middle distance. In Mm,11.73 the central focus of the composition is a tomb of Hellenistic or Roman date, which still stands complete just outside the ancient city of Mylasa; the burial chamber is in the lower storey. Pars's view of the stadium at Laodicea, Mm,11.70, is perhaps the most remarkable of the series both in terms of composition and his sensitivity to the nuances of atmosphere. On the return journey to England, the party stopped briefly in Athens, where Pars made several studies, including a view of the Erectheum, Mm,11.4. Colour notes inscribed in pencil suggest that Pars did in fact work on his watercolours in front of the motif at least to a fairly advanced stage.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1769, London, Royal Academy, no. 83
1972 Sep-Nov, London, Council of Europe, 'Age of Neo-classicism', no.712
1977 Oct-Nov, Louisville, Speed Mus, British watercolours, no.18
1985, BM, British Landscape Watercolours, no.42a
2007 Mar-June, Beijing, Palace Museum, Britain meets the World
2021, 24 Mar-5 Sept, London, Sir John Soane's Museum, In Search of Ionia
- Associated titles
Associated Title: Ionian Antiquities
- Acquisition date
- 1799
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- Mm,11.63