Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) [Aw313]
A ROCKY LANDSCAPE, 1773-1775
Watercolour and grey wash over pencil; inscribed by the artist on the reverse: a Small flat Rock covered wth. moss & trees/the whole of a Low tone of colouring it’s variegated/wth. dark Coloured moss deep purplish grey & blackish/Grey spots, the Light spots of a cold fleshy colour amongst/dark Grey are some beautiful spots of warm -/& reddish brown are some spots of white -/shapes scattered up & down there are also some few/Spots of light orange moss (H. 29 cm, W. 30 cm)
This rare landscape watercolour by Wright of Derby, who is best known for his portraits and landscapes in oil, dates from his trip to Italy from 1773 to 1775. He left England on 1st November 1773 in the company of his new wife Ann, his pupil Richard Hurlestone, and his fellow portrait painter John Downman. He recorded the antique sculptures he saw in Rome and repeatedly drew the Sistine Chapel (see sketchbooks in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, New York). He was surprised by the beauty of the landscape around Rome which he encountered on sketching trips with Downman. In a letter to his sister Nancy of 22nd May 1774, he wrote: `The natural scenes are beautiful and uncommon, with an atmosphere so pure and clear, that objects twenty miles distant seem not half the way’.
Given his love of effects of light, Wright found two Italian subjects which particularly appealed to him and which he painted on a number of occasions – the eruption of Vesuvius and the annual firework display in Rome known as the `Girandola’. He wrote to his brother Richard: `The one [is] the greatest effect of Nature the other of Art that I suppose can be’.
Wright’s landscape sketches were drawn largely for his own interest and were not often used as the basis for later finished pictures, though his oil painting of Virgil’s Tomb with a Figure of Silus Italicus (1779, Yale Centre for British Art) does include a prominent outcrop of rock with trees growing from it. The present drawing is part of a group of landscape studies which were with the art dealers Colnaghi in 1966. Other Italian wash drawings by the artist are in the Tate Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum and the Rhode Island School of Design with a large group in the Derby Art Gallery.
Exhibited: City Art Gallery, Derby, 1947; on loan to the Ulster Museum, 1980–1993.
Literature: Iolo William, Early English Watercolours (London, 1952), p. 79.
Provenance: Miss N.K. Wood (by 1947); Sotheby’s, 20 July 1966 (part lot 209); Colnaghi, London, 1966; Major-General Sir John D’Arcy Anderson and Lady Elizabeth Anderson; gift of Lady Anderson, 1993.