- Museum number
- 1962,0714.42
- Description
-
View of Tivoli and the Roman Campagna; looking down over wide valley, bathed in evening light, falls to left, descending in stages to meandering river in valley, two figures watch from right foreground. 1790
Watercolour with bodycolour
- Production date
- 1790
- Dimensions
-
Height: 320 millimetres
-
Width: 444 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The following text is from K. Sloan, 'A Noble Art, amateur artists and drawing masters 1600-1800', BM, 2000, no. 103, pp. 143-4:
Iolo Williams, who once owned this drawing, thought that it showed the strong influence of Paul Sandby because of its use of bodycolour and an Italianate composition. He remarked that high objects and diagonal lines guiding the eye were Laporte's favourite compositional motifs. Rather than Sandby's direct influence, however, this work is an example of how landscapists who were often also drawing masters, like Sandby and Laporte (who had military pupils at Addiscombe, as well as private ones), demonstrated their ability in works they painted for public exhibition. Because oil painting was still considered a superior medium by collectors and connoisseurs, even at the end of the century, they employed bodycolour particularly for works for exhibition, because it was closer to oil in effect and colour and had literally a stronger 'presence' on crowded exhibition walls than tinted watercolour drawings.
Such drawings are something of a shock to modern eyes used to the latter, but bodycolour had been popular and in constant use throughout the eighteenth century and the colours which seem garish to modern eyes are comparable to the bright colours of the skies in the oil paintings of Alexander Cozens, Wright of Derby and Joseph Vernet. In the last decades of the century, collectors like Sir William Hamilton and Richard Colt Hoare were bringing back from Italy similarly brightly coloured works in bodycolour by Fabris, Hackert, and Della Gatta.
Sandby had never been to Italy but painted similar Italianate compositions based on the work he had seen by Goupy, Zuccarelli and Ricci, some examples of which he owned himself. Basil Long suggested that Laporte's use of bodycolour was a deliberate reminder of his continental, probably French, origin, intended to attract patrons and pupils, but Laporte was probably taught by John Melchior Barralet, a Huguenot from Dublin who ran a drawing school there and in London with his brother in the 1770s and who also exhibited in bodycolour. In the 1790s, the use of this medium began to fall away after John Robert Cozens, Warwick Smith and later Turner and Girtin began to demonstrate other ways of lending 'presence' to watercolours.
At some date Laporte taught Dr Monro (to whom he sold around £500 worth of drawings) and his later works and well-known drawing books indicate that he, unlike Sandby, was attempting to keep up with developments in technique and public taste for painting in watercolour. He produced an influential series of soft-ground etchings, 'A Collection of Prints illustrative of English Scenery, from the drawings and sketches of Thomas Gainsborough' (1802-4), listing on the title page the collectors who owned the drawings that were the sources of these prints, including the Baroness Lucas (cat. 110), Dr Monro, and himself. It also served as a drawing book, as did his 'Characters of Trees' (1798-1801), remarkably close to John Robert Cozens's publication of 1789, and two successful landscape manuals which demonstrated in a series of progressive plates how to sketch from nature (1804) and paint in watercolours (1812).
Literature: Basil Long, 'John Laporte, Landscape Painter and Etcher', Walker's Quarterly, VIII 1922, pp. 3-58; Williams, pp. 61-2; Hardie pp. 239-40; Peter Bicknell and Jane Munro, 'Gilpin to Ruskin: Drawing Masters and their Manuals, 1800-1860', exh. Fitzwilliam, Cambridge 1988, pp. 52-3, 132.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1962 Nov, BM, Iolo Williams Bequest, no.40
2000 May-Sep, BM P&D, 'A Noble Art', no.103
- Acquisition date
- 1962
- Acquisition notes
- This item has an uncertain or incomplete provenance for the years 1933-45. The British Museum welcomes information and assistance in the investigation and clarification of the provenance of all works during that era.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1962,0714.42