Volume 44, Number 4 · March 6, 1997
Who Was Thomas Jones?
By James Fenton
BOOKS AND EXHIBITIONS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
In The Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting 26-September 2, 1996; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, October 11, 1996-January 12, 1997; and the St. Louis Art Museum, February 21-May 18, 1997
exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May
Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition
by Peter Galassi
Yale University, 258 pp., $30.00 (paper)
In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting
catalog of the exhibition, by Philip Conisbee, by Sarah Faunce, by Jeremy Strick, with guest curator Peter Galassi
National Gallery of Art, Washington/Yale University Press, 288 pp., $27.00 (paper)
Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography
catalog of the exhibition, by Peter Galassi
Museum of Modern Art, 152 pp.
The traveling exhibition 'In the Light of Italy' (recently at the Brook-lyn Museum of Art and shortly to reopen at the St. Louis Art Museum) features half a dozen luminous oil sketches of Naples made in the 1780s by Thomas Jones. A further two of these extraordinary studies, in which the artist seems to compose his scene at random, and to lavish his attention on the mundane details of crumbling walls and rooftops of indeterminate age, were included in the Tate's recent 'Grand Tour' show. In both exhibitions, Jones was paired with a scarcely less remarkable artist, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes: in London we saw his twin views of a roof-top with a clothesline at two different times of day; in Brooklyn there were views in and around Rome, and another of these twinned views of the same site under different conditions of light—Rocca di Papa in the Mist and Rocca di Papa under Clouds.
Review, 5306 words
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