The Artist: Volaire was born into a dynasty of painters in Toulon, a city along the French Mediterranean coast.[1] In 1754, the well-established sea and landscape painter Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) arrived in Toulon as part of Louis XV’s highly publicized commission to portray the principal ports of France in a series of twenty-four paintings.[2] Vernet’s presence in the city had a lasting impact on Volaire, who worked alongside him during this formative period and took up his well-established tropes of juxtaposing contrasting light and atmospheric conditions: sunlight versus moonlight, dawn versus dusk, stormy versus calm seas. From 1763, Volaire studied in Rome, but around 1767 he moved to Naples, where he adapted Vernet’s dramatic pictorial language in order to capture the natural wonder of Mount Vesuvius in its various states of eruption. The volcano’s particularly sensational explosion in 1771 became the kernel for nearly all of Volaire’s subsequent compositions. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Volaire’s name had become completely synonymous with his views of molten lava and billowing smoke around the Bay of Naples.
The Painting: Overflowing with brilliant red, yellow, and orange lava, Mount Vesuvius sends up clouds of smoke into the night sky; the far distance, by contrast, has been painted in cool shades of silvery blue moonlight that illuminates the calm water of the Bay of Naples. The grandeur of this natural spectacle is emphasized by excited groups of onlookers who appear silhouetted against the shimmering bay and red-hot lava.
According to geologists and the leading authority on Volaire, this painting was likely executed in or just after 1776, when a specific eruption at Mount Vesuvius resulted in the lava flow depicted.[3] By this date, Volaire had established his signature chromatic range and dramatic techniques of contrasting light based on his repetitions of the earlier, especially grand eruption of 1771 that he recorded in one of his most immersive and spectacular paintings,
The Eruption of Vesuvius (The Art Institute of Chicago).[4] Volaire’s teacher, Vernet, frequently painted paired or pendant compositions that contrasted atmospheric effects such as the calm and the stormy sea or sunrise and sunset. This was an aesthetic decision, but also a marketing one as it presumably prompted collectors to buy two rather than only one canvas. Vernet consolidated such juxtapositions, however, into single compositions, often through the conceit of a warm campfire set against the cool night sky illuminated by moonlight that reflected on the sea (see fig. 1 above). In the subject of Naples seen at night, Volaire found the perfect means of transposing the formal features of Vernet’s compositional type into a specific, real-world landscape: the fiery peak of Mount Vesuvius and silvery Bay of Naples. Moreover, the incalculable, destructive power of the volcano allowed Volaire to engage in an aesthetic of the Sublime, an appreciation in art and literature of phenomena so vast and forceful that they reduced mankind to a state of disempowered awe. The aesthetic of the Sublime was articulated first by English Grand Tourists—in response to travel between 1699 and 1703, Joseph Addison wrote “The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror”—and was given its most extensive early expression in Edmund Burke (1729–1797)’s
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). By the 1770s, Volaire’s international, Grand Tourist clientele would have been well-aware of the Sublime as an aesthetic category that traversed philosophy, literature, painting, and even landscape gardening.
Grand Tourists’ visits to the live lava flows and even the edge of the crater became unmissable thrills on any respectable itinerary. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) left particularly evocative records of his visits in 1787, aspects of which resonate directly with Volaire’s imagery. On March 2nd, Goethe wrote, “Thursday I ascended Vesuvius […] I took a carriage as far as Resina, and then, on the back of a mule, began the ascent, having vineyards on both sides. Next, on foot, I crossed the lava of the year 1771 […] At last we reached the ancient crater, now filled up, where we found recent lava, only two months and fourteen days old, and also a slight streak of only five days, which was, however, already cold. Passing over these, we next ascended a height which had been thrown up by volcanic action; it was smoking from all points. As the smoke rolled away from us, I essayed to approach the crater; scarcely, however, had we taken fifty steps in the steam, when it became so dense that I could scarcely see my shoes.”[5] Two months later, on June 8th, Goethe described the landscape by night, “I saw simultaneously the moon, the reflection of the moon on the edge of the clouds, the reflection of the moon on the sea and on the edge of the nearest waves, the lights of the light-house, the fire of Vesuvius, its reflection in the water, and the lights on the ships. This light in so many different forms made a unique spectacle.”[6]
By 1738, at the base of Mount Vesuvius, excavations of ash revealed the ancient towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. For the general visitor and intellectuals alike, these sites underscored not only the power of natural forces that could at any moment dwarf humankind and its civilization, but also the leaps in history whereby the present was but an inconsequential blip in time. These archeological discoveries not only further solidified Naples’s place on the Grand Tour, but also in providing visitors with various ways to experience the Sublime. Working from imagery of destruction wrought in 1771, in one of his most dynamic compositions, Volaire imagined contemporary Naples experiencing a repetition of the Bay’s tragic history (fig. 2). In a far calmer composition, in 1779 the British painter Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) would play on these temporal dimensions in another celebrated Neapolitan site, the tomb of Virgil (70 –19 B.C.), which Wright imagined through a remarkably similar, juxtaposition of hot and cold light sources (The Met
2013.155).
Like most view painters, Volaire seems to have conceived of his sweeping landscapes before inserting staffage in order to animate the foreground. In paintings such as this, they tend to be seen in silhouette, perched atop a stable, hardened lava flow. Separate drawings typically worked out these actors, who could be repeated in multiple compositions. In this painting, the figure that leans on a rock seen at the far right corresponds to the unusual pose of a young man in a drawing with two other, unrelated figures (private collection, Paris).[7] The small scale of Volaire’s figures relative to Mount Vesuvius underscores his deliberate evocation of the Sublime.
In this particular composition, Volaire’s vantage point, taken from closer to Pompeii and the Torre dell’Annunziata, resulted in an inversion of the artist’s typical view, such that Vesuvius appears on the right. The more typical arrangement can be found, for example, in compositions such as
The Eruption at Vesusvius (1774; Compton Verney, Warwickshire). Beck Saiello (2010) notes that the inversion of the present composition makes it highly unusual, if not unique, in Volaire’s oeuvre and may help to identify its early provenance.[8]
Mount Vesuvius’s Reach Across Visual Culture: The broad range of items Grand Tourists might bring back as souvenirs of their visit to Italy provides fascinating insight into the variety of price points and media available. This was true for Venice and Rome, of course, for which the
vedute, or view paintings, were but the most luxurious means of recording a visit (see The Met’s particularly rich collection of paintings by Giovanni Paolo Panini [1691–1765], Canaletto [1697–1768], Francesco Guardi [1712–1793], and Bernardo Bellotto [1721–1780]). For Naples, the key phenomenon to record, however, was not architecture, ruins, or cityscapes, but topographically precise images documenting visitors’ experiences of the landscape as a natural phenomenon, the representation of which grew out of traditional, allegorical imagery depicting the element of Fire (
22.118.2).
As discussed above, the discovery of the Herculaneum in 1709 (fully under excavation by 1738 when Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples, began a large-scale uncovering of nearby Pompeii) brought renewed attention to Naples. The role of Mount Vesuvius in simultaneously destroying and preserving these towns captivated the popular imagination, then as now. Natural phenomena and imagining the ancient world fueled visual culture in all varieties. By the 1770s, handheld fans, a ubiquitous accessory among European men and women alike, regularly depicted the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. The Met’s collection includes a particularly rich group of Italian parchment and paper folding fans (
63.90.73;
14.73;
38.91.104;
63.90.26). By 1800, the view had even been translated into patterns for embroidery that incorporated bits and pieces of what were meant to represent ancient artifacts (
32.121.3). Those seeking Volaire’s views in particular but unable to afford his paintings might have purchased one of several prints published after his work or consult his plate illustrating Michele Torcia’s
Report of the Most Recent Eruption of Vesuvius that occurred in August of this year, 1779 (
Relazione dell’ultima Eruzione del Vesuvio accaduta nel mese di Agosto di quest’anno 1779; see an unlettered version of this plate, The Met
2013.1000).[9]
Often filtered directly through Volaire’s powerful imagery, Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples continued to capture artists’ imaginations well into the nineteenth century. Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)’s dramatic
Eruption of Vesuvius (
2019.167.1) reverberates with Volaire’s precedent, but achieved a more documentary aspect based on the artist’s visit to the site in December 1820. Testament to its importance and the continued desirability of such views, Dahl offered the painting as a gift to Prince Christian Frederick, later King Christian XVIII of Denmark. In 1881, August Renoir (1841–1919) visited Naples, depicting its bay and Vesuvius in soft landscapes that left the volcano sitting in suspenseful calm in the smoky distance (The Met
56.135.8 and The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.). Recalling the fans and prints of Volaire’s time, in the 1880s at the opposite end of the visual culture spectrum, New York City’s Kinney Tobacco Company issued “Magic Changing Cards” depicting the Bay of Naples which, when held up to the light, seemed to transform Mount Vesuvius from a calm peak into one overflowing with molten lava (The Met,
Burdick 218, N223.43). From oil on canvas to popular prints, nineteenth-century European visions of Naples were, moreover, impacted by a widespread admiration for Japanese woodblock prints, in which Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)’s series of Mount Fuji dating to the 1840s were some of the most influential, thereby adding a more global lens to the Grand Tour tradition (such as
JP2567, among others).
David Pullins 2020
[1] On Volaire’s life and work see Beck Saiello 2010.
[2] Initially exclusively Vernet’s commission, it was his principal occupation between 1753 and 1765 when he completed fifteen paintings. Of Vernet’s three views of Toulon (dated 1754 to 1755), one is in the Musée du Louvre and two are in the Musée National de la Marine, Paris. Between 1792 and 1798, Vernet’s student Jean-François Hue continued six additional paintings. See
Joseph Vernet (1714-1789): Les vues des ports de France, exh. cat., Musée de la Marine, Paris, 2011.
[3] Beck Saiello 2010 with citation of Giovanni Ricciardi, p. 234.
[4] Beck Saiello 2010, p. 222, no. P49.
[5]
The Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Boston: 1902, vol. 3, p. 299.
[6] Ettore Ghibellino and Daniel J. Farrelly,
Goethe and Anna Amalia. A Forbidden Love?, Wicklow, Ireland, 2007, p. 123.
[7] Beck Saiello 2010, p. 368, no. D173.
[8] Beck Saiello 2010, pp. 234–35, no. P78. Additional thanks to Émilie Beck Saiello for her recent help in gathering relevant provenance information for this work.
[9] Beck Saiello 2010, pp. 404–6.
