Claude-Joseph Vernet

Born Avignon, 14 Aug 1714; Died Paris, 4 Dec 1789.

1. Life and work.

(i) Early years and Rome, to 1753.

Vernet probably received his first lessons in painting from his father, Antoine, who then encouraged him to move to the studio of Philippe Sauvan (1697–1792), the leading master in Avignon. Sauvan supplied altarpieces to local churches and decorative works and mythologies for grand houses in the area. After this apprenticeship Vernet worked in Aix-en-Provence with the decorative painter Jacques Viali (fl 1681– 1745), who also painted landscapes and marine pictures. In 1731 Vernet independently produced a suite of decorative overdoors for the hôtel of the Marquise de Simiane at Aix-en-Provence; at least two of these survive (in situ) and are Vernet’s earliest datable landscapes. These are early indications of his favoured type of subject, and Vernet would have studied works attributed to such 17th-century masters as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa in private collections at Aix and Avignon. Three years later Joseph de Seytres, Marquis de Caumont, who had previously recommended Vernet to the Marquise de Simiane, offered to sponsor a trip to Italy. This was partly for Vernet to complete his artistic education but also to provide his sponsor with drawings of antiquities.

In the early 18th century Avignon was still papal territory; this meant that Vernet had some useful connections among influential churchmen when he arrived in Rome. He soon found himself at home in the French artistic community there, among other southerners such as Pierre Subleyras. He was allowed access to the Académie de France in Rome and was encouraged to pursue landscape studies by its Director, Nicolas Vleughels. He was also recommended to the French marine painter Adrien Manglard, who was well established in Rome and who may have taken Vernet into his studio. By 1738 Vernet was making his reputation as a marine and landscape painter, for about then he began to keep a record of his commissions. A number of these notebooks survive (Avignon, Mus. Calvet; see also Lagrange, 1864), and they reveal that his first important patron was Paul-Hippolyte, Duc de Saint-Aignan, France’s Ambassador to Rome and a keen supporter of young French artists based there. The present whereabouts of the important works Vernet produced for him—recording events during the Duc’s mission of 1739—is not known. Vernet’s earliest known Italian works (c. 1737–8), such as the Cascades at Tivoli (Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.) or the Rocky Landscape in Italy (London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.), are reminiscent of Dughet and show his response to the wilder aspects of the Roman Campagna. They are more softly lit than Dughet’s, however, and their superb brushwork is one of the hallmarks of Vernet’s early Italian period. With them, Vernet was joining a long tradition of artists who depicted picturesque sites such as Tivoli, producing pictures for increasing numbers of visitors making the Grand Tour. These were to be Vernet’s chief patrons during nearly 20 years’ residence in Italy, especially the British, who virtually monopolized the Grand Tour in his day. Other patrons included Roman nobles, churchmen and French diplomats. Vernet’s contacts with British visitors may have been facilitated by his marriage in 1745 to Virginia Parker, daughter of a captain in the papal navy; her father sometimes handled Vernet’s business affairs. Vernet made some topographical works in Italy: a pair of views of the Bay of Naples (1748; Paris, Louvre) for François-Claude de Montboissier, Abbé de Canillac, French chargé d’affaires in Rome; for Elizabeth Farnese, wife of Philip V of Spain, a view of the Villa Farnese, Caprarola (1746; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), which includes the Queen’s entourage; and modest Roman views such as the Ponte Rotto and the Castel S Angelo (both Paris, Louvre). While the small-scale and refined observation of this latter pair foreshadow the open-air paintings of Corot and his generation, the larger paintings are part of a pan-European development of topography in the early 18th century, as exemplified by Canaletto’s work in Venice and London or by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Roman prints. Vernet’s paintings are distinguished by their sharp observation, precise yet exquisite handling, and by the lively interest of his figures.

Imaginary landscapes and marine pictures account for the larger part of Vernet’s output in Italy. The marine paintings, always set on an Italianate coast, fall into two contrasting types: calm and storm. The storm pictures vary, depicting ships either in danger or actually wrecked; the calm views are particularized by their light, atmosphere and time of day or night. The landscapes also vary in the time of day depicted, but, except for an occasional stormy scene, their weather is benign. In this way Vernet introduced variety into his art. His paintings were often conceived as pairs or sets of four; the set (1751; Rohrau, Schloss) commissioned by Aloys Thomas Raimund, Graf von Harrach, and the four ovals (1750; Russborough, Co. Wicklow) commissioned for the country seat of Joseph Leeson, later 1st Earl of Milltown, are typical. The latter show a calm, morning coastal view, a shipwreck at midday, a rosy evening harbour scene and a coastal scene by night. Through such pictures Vernet contributed to a developing sensibility in the 18th century for experiences of Nature in all its moods. Where his views were not strictly topographical representations, they strongly suggested sites on the itinerary of many a traveller through Italy: the hills and cascades of Tivoli, the harbour, lighthouses and old fortresses of Naples, or the undeveloped coastline near Naples and Rome. Vernet was the most talented of a number of landscape artists who supplied visitors to Rome with such souvenirs: Pieter van Bloemen and Andrea Locatelli provided Arcadian and pastoral landscapes, while Giovanni Paolo Panini specialized in fanciful pictures of the city or its ancient ruins. Some of Vernet’s landscapes are reminiscent of the wild terrain of Rosa’s work, while seaports recall those of Claude. Not only were his own works evocative of well-known sites, their allusiveness in both style and content to the works of admired Old Masters added to their appeal. In 1750, for example, a Seaport: Sunset (Duke of Buccleuch priv. col.) was commissioned to be painted expressly in the manner of Claude. Some works are recorded as having been commissioned ‘in the manner of Salvator Rosa’, while others are clearly reminiscent of Dughet. Vernet’s own pictorial world is less idealized than that of Claude, and there is a sharper sense of particularized observation that the spectator can more readily explore. He skilfully combined sharp observation with a sure sense of decoration, which meant his paintings worked well in 18th-century interiors such as those at Russborough, Co. Wicklow. His pleasing effects were managed by juxtaposition of variously textured rocks, pools, cascades, leafy or blasted trees, sandy banks and so on, and above all by finding a rich diversity of brushwork with which to render them. He had a fine feeling for the medium of oil paint, so that he was enjoyed as a connoisseurs’ painter.

Vernet was recognized by the Roman artistic community with his election to the Accademia di S Luca in 1743. Official recognition in his own country began when he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in Paris on 6 August 1746, which enabled him to exhibit at the Salon for the first time that year; on 23 April 1753 he was received (reçu) as a full member. Exhibiting regularly at the Salon meant that Vernet’s work became well known in Paris. When Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, later the Marquis de Marigny and Directeur des Bâtiments, made his educational tour of Italy in 1750, he and his party visited Vernet’s studio in Rome. Very likely it was then that plans were laid for Vernet’s return to France, and for his undertaking a major commission for Louis XV.

(ii) Later career, 1753–89.

Vernet returned to live in France in 1753, beginning work on a series of large topographical paintings of major French commercial and military seaports. The Ports of France was one of the most important royal commissions of Louis XV’s reign and at one level may be seen as propaganda for the French merchant and royal navies, which, ironically, were soon to take a severe beating during the Seven Years War (1756–63). If completed, the whole series would have comprised perhaps two dozen paintings, but Vernet produced only 15 (2 in Paris, Louvre; 13 on dep. Paris, Mus. Mar.). Vernet followed an official itinerary along the French coast from Antibes in the Mediterranean to Dieppe on the English Channel via Toulon, Marseille, Bandol, Sète, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Rochefort and La Rochelle. After visiting each port, he was required to report back to Marigny, explaining which views he had chosen and justifying any changes in his itinerary. Some ports merited two views (Marseille, Bayonne and Bordeaux), while Toulon needed three. At times Vernet found it difficult to reconcile the topographical requirements of his patrons with his own concern to create satisfying works of art. In 1756 there was almost acrimonious correspondence over whether he was allowed to show a storm at sea in the foreground of the Port of Sète; Vernet had his way, and Marigny was pleased with the result. Each painting has its own beauties, and they were well received at the Salons, where they were exhibited between 1755 and 1765. They are full of fascinating detail, for Vernet had to include all the characteristic activities of each port; this gives the pictures an almost scientific interest that is typical of the Enlightenment. He finally gave up the task and settled in Paris in 1765, the series incomplete; during the Revolution Jean-François Huë was commissioned to continue it. Vernet continued to produce variations on his well-tried themes of Italianate landscapes, calm seaports, stormy coasts, shipwrecks and moonlit harbours for the rest of his career; works such as Storm with a Shipwreck (London, Wallace), bought by his patron Jean Girardot de Marigny in 1754, could equally well have been produced at a later date. In 1778 he made a trip to Switzerland with Marigny; instead of adapting his manner to fashionable depictions of Alpine scenery he chose to paint sites such as the Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., p. 24) in the style he had formed in Italy 30 years earlier.

2. Critical reception and posthumous reputation.

Vernet’s international reputation had followed him from Rome to France, and to his British and French clients he added German princes and Russian nobles. From the 1760s to the 1780s no collection was deemed complete without examples of Vernet’s art. He was the leading landscape and marine painter of France—even of Europe, if the newly developing (and essentially insular) school of landscape painting in Britain is discounted. Only post-Romantic prejudice led some 19th- and 20th-century commentators to criticize Vernet’s repetition of subject-matter as lacking in invention or self-renewal. He was responding to market demand, though he gradually developed a slightly harder handling and colour; some discriminating connoisseurs in his own day preferred the more supple brushwork and poetic effects of light and colour of the Italian period. He was best known for his storms and shipwrecks; his grandson (3) Horace Vernet even received a government commission for Joseph Vernet Attached to the Mast Painting a Storm (Avignon, Mus. Calvet). The Salon critics loved to describe the actions and gestures of the figures on seashores or doomed in wrecks, who were helpless pawns in these elemental dramas. Denis Diderot wrote eloquent commentaries on Vernet in his Salon reviews, notably in 1767. The excellence of Vernet’s figure drawing and his mastery of gesture and expression brought his work close to the admired genre of history painting. Moreover, the horror of his shipwrecks gave precisely that aesthetic pleasure to be had from safe contemplation of disaster and misfortune, a topic probed in Edmund Burke’s contemporaneous Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

Such artists as Pierre-Jacques Volaire or Joseph Wright of Derby would develop the more sensational aspects of Vernet’s art to greater extremes. Volaire was a pupil of Vernet for a time, while Wright, like many artists, knew of Vernet’s work via British or perhaps Italian collections and occasionally painted a Vernet-like moonlit harbour or other Italianate coast scene. The young Scottish artist Jacob More, inspired by Vernet’s Landscape with a Waterfall (Duke of Buccleuch priv. col), painted his Falls of the Clyde (Edinburgh, N.G.) before setting off in 1773 to study in Italy. The Italian Carlo Bonavia exploited Vernet’s success in Italy, producing his own variations on Vernet themes during the 1750s and 1760s. These are still sometimes mistaken for works by Vernet, but Bonavia employed more open compositions and a distinctive brushwork. Around 1750 Vernet encouraged Richard Wilson to study landscape, and Wilson was to some extent influenced by his subject-matter and style. Later in Paris in 1781 Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes took Vernet’s advice on painting from nature out of doors; this was to have important consequences for French landscape painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Many minor artists, such as Jean Pillement or Alexandre-Jean Noël (1752–1834), the latter for a time a pupil of Vernet, occasionally produced works in his manner. Others, such as Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, worked in Rome during the 1750s and early 1760s, producing paintings in an Italianate or Vernet-like manner, whether directly inspired by him or not. Those recorded as copying works by Vernet, for instance Thomas Patch, almost inevitably produced their own Italianate works in his manner. Apart from Volaire, his chief assistant and follower was Charles-François Grenier de Lacroix. In his notebook of 1746 Vernet recorded a payment to ‘Grenier’ for making copies, and it seems that Vernet employed him in his studio to this end. There are paintings by Lacroix at Uppark (W. Sussex, NT), signed and dated 1751, that are precise copies of works by Vernet in the same collection and virtually indistinguishable from the originals. Excellent copies or replicas of Vernet paintings appear from time to time, but too little is known about his studio practice always to ascertain whether they are autograph or by some good copyist such as Lacroix. Among Vernet’s Provençal followers was Jean Henry d’Arles (1734–84), who worked in and around Marseille producing somewhat mannered imitations of Vernet (e.g. Shipwreck, 1756; Marseille, Mus. B.-A.); he also executed some large-scale decorative paintings of Italianate seaports. Jean-François Huë was another follower, and perhaps had lessons from Vernet, but is chiefly remembered for his commission to take up the Ports of France series.

Philip Conisbee and Dorathea K. Beard. "Vernet." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T088956pg1 (accessed March 8, 2012).