Capriccio with Roman Ruins, a Pyramid and Figures
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Victoria and Albert Museum |
| Location History: | This painting has been in the museum’s collection since 1882, when it came in as part of a bequest from John Jones, a London tailor and army clothier who died that January. Jones ran his business from 1825, later opening a branch in Dublin in 1840, and travelled a good deal between Ireland and France during those years before retiring in 1850. He spent his final decades living quietly at 95 Piccadilly. Jones built up one of the most significant British collections of French eighteenth century furniture and porcelain of his day, second only to the Marquess of Hertford and his son Richard Wallace. This Guardi capriccio came into his hands alongside that broader collecting interest, and when he died it passed to the V&A as part of the wider group of British watercolours and oil paintings included in his bequest, pieces that, like much of what he owned, reflected his long attachment to France. There’s no record before Jones acquired it of where the painting had been or who held it earlier. |
A broken Roman arch sits right at the front of the picture, held up by a couple of Corinthian columns that look like they’ve been standing there far too long. Past it, there’s a church with its bell tower catching some light, and off to the left a small pyramid next to a statue that’s clearly seen better days. At the extreme back the ground opens up toward the sea. None of this is a real place, and that’s sort of the point. Guardi pulled remnants of ancient Rome together and mixed them with his imagination, which is basically what artists were doing when they painted capricci in this period. A few small figures poke around in the rubble near the bottom, digging for anything worth selling. People really did that back then, hunting old sites for relics to pass on to collectors, and Guardi tossed it into the scene almost in passing, not as the main event. The light is really where the painting lives. Greens and silvery greys, shadows falling unevenly across the stone so the ruins start to look a bit hazy at the edges, almost like they’re dissolving. The sky takes the most space on the canvas and it’s handled loosely, quickly even, in order to create the mood more than the architecture below. Guardi reused this setup more than once. The broken arch and that left section of ruin turn up again in another capriccio, one that’s now in Milan, and this kind of repetition wasn’t unusual for him. Successful arrangements got recycled across paintings rather than reinvented each time. This piece of work was created around 1760-1770 A.D. and is placed somewhere in Guardi’s middle years, a point where the brushwork was already starting to loosen into that freer, almost weightless touch that shows up so clearly in what came after.