Houses in Naples

landscape

Although Thomas Jones, a Welsh painter, painted some ambitious classical landscapes, he is now best known for his remarkable fresh and unaffected oil sketches done in and around Naples and Rome. They are among the earliest British examples of this kind of open-air sketch and have a directness that looks forward to Corot.

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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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