Carlo Bonavia

With Carlo Bruscoli, Florence;

Where acquired by Marquess Niccolò Antinori, Florence, in 1935 and at least until 1962;

With Alberto di Castro, Rome.

W. G. Constable, 'Carlo Bonavia: An Addendum', in The Art Quarterly, vol. 25, 1962, pp. 122-125, fig. 2, 3, 4 and 5;

N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento: dal Rococò al Classicismo, Naples 1987, p. 157 and pp. 377-379, no. 278, fig. 375-378;

N. Spinosa and L. Di Mauro, Vedute napoletane del Settecento, Naples 1996, p. 192 and 247, cat. 64, fig. 63-66.

Painted by Carlo Bonavia, one of the most important Italian landscape painters of his generation, this set of four canvases testifies to the artist's talent for capturing the states of light during the different hours of the day. Here, Bonavia breaks away from the conventions of the landscape painting of his time to offer an almost naturalistic vision, closer to the observed nature.

Published for the first time in 1962 by Constable in the supplement to his catalogue of works by Carlo Bonavia, these four landscapes, sometimes described as representing the four hours of the day, simple lakescapes, or views of the Bay of Naples, are without question amongst the artist’s masterpieces.

Although he was one of the great Italian landscape painters of the eighteenth century, Carlo Bonavia is still not well known. Probably born in Rome, he was mainly active from the mid-1750s in Naples, where he stayed until his death in 1788. Although he was influenced early on by the art of Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), most of his inspiration came from Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), leading to much confusion in terms of attribution. Like the celebrated French landscape painter, Bonavia succeeded in building an international clientele of foreign aristocrats on the Grand Tour, such as Lord Brudenell and Count Karl Joseph Firmian (1716–1782), who became the Austrian ambassador in Naples from 1753 to 1758 and who owned no less than seventeen of the artist’s works.

Executed with an original sense of composition, the four present paintings can be dated to around the 1750s. While Vernet’s influence is visible, here Bonavia has nevertheless partly escaped from the landscape genre conventions that were applied almost systematically at that time. It is true that the figures, some of the follies and a few details belong to the usual repertoire (vocabulaire) of Vernet’s followers, but on the other hand the compositions demonstrate a strongly individual quality and an assured restraint, standing apart from the more stereotypical approach to landscape taken by his contemporaries. Unlike many of these artists, Bonavia here expresses a form of realism ahead of the picturesque, aiming at a more spontaneous, less artificial vision of nature: in this he anticipates the evolution of the landscape genre by nearly half a century.