Thomas Jones, 'A Wall in Naples'

The smallest painting in the National Gallery is a beautifully executed painting of the simplest of subjects: a shabby stone wall. The director and the curator, Christopher Riopelle, look at why Thomas Jones painted it.

Transcript

Charles Saumarez Smith
One of the most striking things about this painting is perhaps its tiny scale. I spoke to Christopher Riopelle, curator of 19th-century painting.

Christopher Riopelle
"This painting has the honour of being actually the smallest painting in the National Gallery, but it fits in beautifully with our collection of oil sketches, showing how 18th- and 19th-century artists went out and found ways to observe and depict nature directly."

Charles Saumarez Smith
The subject couldn't be more mundane: just an ordinary stone building, with laundry left out to dry in the heat of the sun.

The setting is Naples, where the artist, Thomas Jones, lived in the 1770s and 80s. While there, he made a remarkable series of sketches of the gritty urban scene; they weren't to sell, but rather, for his own study and enjoyment, and they remained unknown until the early 1950s.

Christopher Riopelle
"Thomas Jones is a new discovery; except for a few, large pictures, nothing was known of his small-scale oil sketches, until they came up for sale in 1952 when a small group of people realised that he was an extraordinary figure".

Charles Saumarez Smith
It took another forty years for the National Gallery to acquire this, its first painting by Thomas Jones, and it's without doubt one of his strongest and most compelling works. I asked Christopher what accounts for the recent revival of interest in the work of this artist.

Christopher Riopelle
"I think it's the vividness with which he captures utterly mundane motifs, like walls, like laundry hanging out to dry. There's nothing to it and yet the intensity with which he observes is extraordinary".

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