Francis Towne died in 1816 and, in accordance with his wishes, his friends James White and F H Merivale presented his Roman drawings to the British Museum. To mark the 200th anniversary of his death, all 54 views of Rome have been displayed in a dazzling and fascinating exhibition. During the 19th century Towne’s watercolours fell out of favour and were practically unknown until rediscovered and brought to a wider public by Paul Oppé who published an article about him in the Journal of the Walpole Society in 1920. The style of his watercolours, characterised by fine pen and ink outlines filled by broad washes in pale colours, which stand out for their clarity, had an immediate appeal to the Modernist taste of the 20th-century viewer and his watercolours are ever more appreciated today. Considerable research has been undertaken since 1920, with a major exhibition of his work in the Tate Gallery in 1997. Today, the British Museum provides a rare opportunity to examine in depth a body of what is undoubtedly his most successful work. The watercolours are displayed in the order in which they were executed and are accompanied by very informative labels.
Towne set out for Rome in 1780, at the relatively late age of 41, already a fully-formed watercolour artist. He had originally been trained as a coach-painter in London before moving to Exeter in the 1760s where he took up the profession of a ‘much in demand’ drawing master. This led to profitable commissions from local landowners who became his regular patrons, notably Lord Clifford, who desired drawings of his estate at Ugbrooke. In 1777 Towne, with his friend James White, went on a tour of Wales capturing its dramatic scenery. His style of drawing in ink with fine outlines combined with pale watercolour washes reveals a technique which would mature under the blazing sun in Rome.
At the entrance to the exhibition are two contrasting watercolours: Inside the Colosseum, numbered 1 in the series which he labelled ‘Rome’ and perhaps the first drawing he made on his arrival there in October 1780, and Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo, painted just before he left Rome to return to Britain in 1781. By commencing the series with the Colosseum, which he eventually painted eight times, it is suggested that Towne was reflecting on its iconic status as a symbol of the ruin of the Rome which was once a mighty empire. Indeed, he confined his interest to ancient sites with no concern for the contemporary city. Here one’s eye wanders through the fallen stones, with sunlight falling on the path and a pale blue sky seen through the minutely delineated ruined arches. In his depiction of Lake Albano he has chosen a view looking down into the lake with darkened trees in the foreground delicately outlined in ink and Castel Gandolfo in shadow picked out on the skyline. In comparison to the particularised detail of the Colosseum, Towne applies flat washes of misty greys and delicate pale blues extending the width of the composition with an added slip of paper. As well as numbering his drawings he methodically added precise details such as date and time, in this case, “drawn on 12 July with the Morning light from the left hand”.
In the wake of the Grand Tourists, Towne travelled around with a small group of British watercolour landscape painters which included his friends William Pars (1742-1782) and John Warwick Smith (1749-1831). They would spend weeks sketching in the countryside around Rome absorbing the landscape which had inspired Claude and, subsequently, Richard Wilson. The latter is represented in the exhibition by a black chalk drawing of Rome from the Ponte Molle (attrib). The distant view is framed by cypresses and an arching tree on the left and a group of small figures below of the sort which would have undoubtedly been a model for Towne. Already in October 1780 he had sketched On the Banks of the River Tiber near Ponte Molle, a small slight watercolour in pen and grey ink and wash. On his return to Exeter, he used it as the basis for an oil painting A View of the Banks of the Tiber at Rome, (1792). This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in his attempt to be elected but he received no votes in this endeavour which was finally to fail.
Towne soon began to work on a larger scale and with growing confidence, as seen in his watercolours of the area north of the Villa Giulia which he painted a number of times. View of a hollow near Arco Oscuro looking toward Villa Medici (1780) reveals a lane between trees and foliage drawn in ink with a great variety and delicacy. With strong contrasts of light and shadow he captures a certain atmosphere and wildness. Very different is his watercolour of A Sepulchre going from Rome to Ponte Nomentano, focussing on a monumental ruined Classical structure of brick and plaster perched on a rocky base. Executed in the most delicate pen work, and painted in pale warm colours against the light blue sky, it is inscribed and dated on the recto “F Towne delt Rome No 20 Dec 12 1780”, on the verso “Rome/Drawn on the Spot/by/Francis Towne/1780/ from 2 o clock till 4/ A Sepulchre by the Road side going from Rome to Ponte Lamentana”. Towne made precise and accurate records on his sketches, as did Constable later, but it is complicated to attempt to reconstruct his movements since he mounted his watercolours many years after his visit to Rome, incorporating revisions and corrections, and regrettably his detailed personal diary from which this information would have been derived has been lost. This exceptionally beautiful watercolour has all the clarity and delicacy of draughtsmanship which makes Towne’s work so attractive, and after his return it was repeated for Thomas Snow who purchased eleven of Towne’s Roman views for his house at Cleve near Exeter. Snow also owned a replica of his watercolour of the Claudian Acqueduct, a striking view of the jutting-out monumental arches looking towards the Palatine, the ruined masonry bathed in warm sunlight against a pale blue sky. On the reverse of the mount is a quotation from Joseph Addison’s guidebook Remarks on several parts of Italy, published in 1705.
Towne painted eight views of the Colosseum which are amongst his grandest achievements. Inside the Colosseum, Taken from the Emperor’s Seat (1781) looks down into the vast ruined interior at a time when it was being used for religious ceremonies. He has left the worshippers and altars uncoloured, a topographical detail which is open to various interpretations, though he painted the arches and ruined arcades and the buildings beyond with precision. Towne was fascinated by the arched galleries and Inside the Colosseum (1780) shows shafts of light penetrating the arched passages with an air of theatricality. In his vertical composition Inside the Colosseum (1780-81) he paints a passage between massive blocks of stone which leads to a partially blocked arch and reveals bright light beyond, and open to the sky above. In a similar scene, Arch and Debris in a ruin on the Palatine (1781), the ruinous scene and view through the arch is drawn in brush over graphite, more freely executed and closer to the style of John Warwick Smith. Scenes such as The Baths of Caracalla (1781) reveal enhanced grandeur and a sense of drama.
In March 1781 Towne made a short visit to Naples, where he was befriended and guided by the Welsh artist Thomas Jones, and amongst his views is one of a popular subject for artists and tourists alike, The Grotto of Posillipo (1781). Towne records the impressive narrow approach between cliff-like rocks which lead to the entrance of the ancient tunnel linking Naples to Posillipo. Drawn in ink with pale washes, his precisely observed shadows subtly enhance the foreboding atmosphere of the dark opening.
On his return to Rome in April 1781, and following in the footsteps of many artists, he found Tivoli a richly inspiring source of compositions which he recorded in his increasingly painterly style. In Tivoli from the Cascades he selected the less usual viewpoint looking up at Tivoli and the Temple of Vesta from the bottom of the gorge, rather than the conventional view of the cascading waterfall. This possibly harks back to James Mason’s etching and engraving after Gaspard Dughet’s View of Tivoli, taken from the same viewpoint and here displayed. In Rome itself he painted a number of Roman ‘sights’. The Temple of Concord is one of his most elaborate compositions in which the angle of the ruined portico, although not so steep, recalls Piranesi’s print in his Veduti di Roma. Strong sunlight from the left plays on the columns and buildings behind, catching a row of white washing strung from a tree perhaps echoing Thomas Jones’s famous oil sketch made in Naples. Unusual for Towne he includes details also to be found in Piranesi’s print, such as the plants in flowerpots, and he added notes to the verso: “It was built as a monument of Reconciliation between the people and the Nobility and Rome”. [From Keysler’s Travels (1756)]
In his later work in Rome he regularly exploited stronger colours by using Gum Arabic as in Gardens of Villa Barberini (1781). The dark trees in the foreground are densely painted with decorative curving trunks picked out theatrically in contrast to the distant lighted area where a statue is glimpsed on a pedestal. Likewise, in the Temple of Minerva at Sunset (1781), the sky glows behind the temple which rises from a bank of darkened trees and whose dome is covered with shrubs and bushes. In complete contrast is the Temple of Vesta (1781) in which he depicted the circular temple in a clear limpid warm sunlight with a shadow cast by the Colosseum. Drawn in pen and ink with the greatest delicacy and refinement, it is for these qualities he is so highly admired today, but it also reveals Towne reverting to his earlier style.
At the very end of his stay Towne visited Lake Nemi, the subject of a grand composition on the very heavy ‘Roman’ paper which he increasingly came to use for outdoor sketching possibly due to his exhausting the supply of paper brought out to Rome by him. He built up the foreground of freely painted trees drawn with pen and ink, while the effect of his washes is almost monochrome. Beyond the Lake in the distance is the blue sea while the sky is left unpainted apart from an indication of cumulus clouds. This very restrained watercolour provides a telling contrast to that of the same subject painted by J. R. Cozens, also during the 1780s and included in the exhibition. Cozens has abandoned line for a more painterly approach and a more poetical result. At the end of July Towne left for England with John Warwick Smith, travelling through Switzerland. This experience resulted in some of Towne’s finest watercolours, though these are not shown in this exhibition. On his return, Towne continued to paint in his customary style but his work was already eclipsed by the new generation of watercolour painters. This exhibition gives one the opportunity to enjoy some of the very best of Francis Towne’s mature watercolours and the Italian light pervading his work. He is no longer forgotten but is highly regarded as one of the finest of early British watercolour painters
An interesting question is why Francis Towne arranged for the complete series of his Roman watercolours to enter the British Museum. It is suggested that they were intended to be a memorial to himself, ensuring posthumously the national acclaim as an artist he had failed to achieve during his lifetime. On the other hand, the subject matter is critical and it is more likely that Towne saw them as complementary to the great collection of Classical sculpture being assembled in the British Museum, a record of the surviving monuments of Classical Rome unencumbered by the accretions of later centuries. This interpretation is given substance by Inside the Colosseum, Taken from the Emperor’s Seat, in which the Baroque altars and the worshippers at them are included for the sake of verisimilitude but not allowed to distract from the record of the ancient structure itself.
There is no catalogue, but during 2016 the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art will publish a free online catalogue raisonné of Towne’s work at francistowne.ac.uk, written by Richard Stephens. Meanwhile, the exhibition is accompanied by an excellent illustrated free brochure, written by Richard Stephens, and supported by Lowell Libson Ltd British Art.
Light, Time, Legacy is at the British Museum until 14th August 2016.