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Lot Essay
Signed and dated ‘1747’, this dramatic coastal landscape, which originally formed part of a set of four paintings by the artist in the Drake collection, is a particularly fine work from the artist’s successful Roman period. Executed on an impressively large scale (toile d’empereur), it displays Vernet’s keen observational skills and his engagement with the concept of the Sublime in nature.
Born in Avignon in 1714, Vernet was first apprenticed in the studio of Philippe Sauvan, the city’s leading painter. He had established such a reputation by 1734 that he was able to travel to Italy under the sponsorship of Joseph de Seytres, le marquis de Caumont (1688-1745), where he settled in Rome for the next two decades. Vernet quickly established a successful practice specialising in picturesque seaports, suffused with gentle light, evoking the work of Claude Lorrain, and in tempestuous seascapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa. These were often commissioned in pairs or sets of four, and proved extremely popular among British aristocrats on the Grand Tour.
The ancient Greek manuscript On the Sublime, commonly attributed to the Pseudo-Longinus, had been rediscovered in the sixteenth century and was popularised by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s translation of 1674. The theory of the awe-inspiring and overwhelming power of nature proved a powerful concept for artist during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The threatening storm clouds, crashing waves, weather battered ruins (which are based on the Tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia, Rome), and gnarled tree growing out of the craggy rocks in this painting all evoke the concept of the Sublime in nature and bring to mind the work of its greatest advocate in painting, Salvator Rosa.
William Drake, a descendant of the renowned Sir Francis Drake, embarked on the Grand Tour in September 1742, accompanied by James Dawkins of Laverstoke, the Rev. Thomas Townson and Edward Holdsworth, with whom he was depicted in a Conversation Piece by James Russel on their arrival in Rome in 1744. While other members of his party travelled south to Naples, Drake remained in the city until he began his homeward journey via Venice in June 1745. It was in Rome, in February 1744, that he commissioned a set of four paintings from Vernet, of which this is one. Upon his return to England, Drake married the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Raworth, whose dowry largely funded the ambitious Palladian reconstruction of his family house of Shardeloes in Buckinghamshire, in part the work of the great Robert Adam. His impressive set of Vernets would have made a fitting addition to his newly designed house. The pictures remained there throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of the family’s impressive collection of paintings which included the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I (Greenwich, National Maritime Museum). The Vernets were eventually sold in these Rooms as part of the Tyrwhitt-Drake Settlement in 1952, when they were separated into two pairs and offered as consecutive lots; both pairs were acquired by Agnews and subsequently dispersed.
Born in Avignon in 1714, Vernet was first apprenticed in the studio of Philippe Sauvan, the city’s leading painter. He had established such a reputation by 1734 that he was able to travel to Italy under the sponsorship of Joseph de Seytres, le marquis de Caumont (1688-1745), where he settled in Rome for the next two decades. Vernet quickly established a successful practice specialising in picturesque seaports, suffused with gentle light, evoking the work of Claude Lorrain, and in tempestuous seascapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa. These were often commissioned in pairs or sets of four, and proved extremely popular among British aristocrats on the Grand Tour.
The ancient Greek manuscript On the Sublime, commonly attributed to the Pseudo-Longinus, had been rediscovered in the sixteenth century and was popularised by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s translation of 1674. The theory of the awe-inspiring and overwhelming power of nature proved a powerful concept for artist during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The threatening storm clouds, crashing waves, weather battered ruins (which are based on the Tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia, Rome), and gnarled tree growing out of the craggy rocks in this painting all evoke the concept of the Sublime in nature and bring to mind the work of its greatest advocate in painting, Salvator Rosa.
William Drake, a descendant of the renowned Sir Francis Drake, embarked on the Grand Tour in September 1742, accompanied by James Dawkins of Laverstoke, the Rev. Thomas Townson and Edward Holdsworth, with whom he was depicted in a Conversation Piece by James Russel on their arrival in Rome in 1744. While other members of his party travelled south to Naples, Drake remained in the city until he began his homeward journey via Venice in June 1745. It was in Rome, in February 1744, that he commissioned a set of four paintings from Vernet, of which this is one. Upon his return to England, Drake married the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Raworth, whose dowry largely funded the ambitious Palladian reconstruction of his family house of Shardeloes in Buckinghamshire, in part the work of the great Robert Adam. His impressive set of Vernets would have made a fitting addition to his newly designed house. The pictures remained there throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of the family’s impressive collection of paintings which included the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I (Greenwich, National Maritime Museum). The Vernets were eventually sold in these Rooms as part of the Tyrwhitt-Drake Settlement in 1952, when they were separated into two pairs and offered as consecutive lots; both pairs were acquired by Agnews and subsequently dispersed.