An Excavation

1777 · Private collection

landscape

Antiquity was the great theme in British painting in the last decades of the 18th century. Its influence can be traced in two areas particularly - in literature, which often comes close to the macabre, and in the excavations of antique sites, which were followed with intense interest at the time. Thomas Jones' painting , documenting one of these excavations, gives an example of the latter.

About the Artist

Thomas Jones

1742 – 1803

Thomas Jones was a Welsh landscape painter who was a pupil of Richards Wilson, 1763-65, and went to the Royal Academy Schools from 1769. He was in Naples and Rome 1776-83 (his memoirs of this period were published in 1951), and there he painted small landscapes on the spot, very like those to be painted much later by Michallon, Valenciennes or even Corot. He gave up painting professionally on his return to London, but continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy, 1784-88, and in 1798. There are six of his Corot-like landscapes in the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.

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