The Welsh painter, Thomas Jones, is best known for his unusual oil-on-paper Neapolitan cityscapes which caught the attention of the British art market in the 1950s more than 150 years after his death. Thomas spent seven years in Italy, three of them in Naples, but his first four years from 1776 to 1780 were spent in Rome, where he learned to read, speak, and write Italian, hired a Danish housekeeper, Maria Moncke, who would become his wife and the mother of his two daughters, and formed friendships within the British resident community in the city, which would last a lifetime. His Romes were many - the one which he traced through the views and brushwork of the artists who painted before him, including his master, Richard Wilson, the one which he walked within and without the walls of the city, guidebook in hand, and the one which he inhabited in the buildings and households of his street in the parish of S. Andrea delle Fratte. This paper brings together Jones’ sketchbooks and Italian book collection and the marks and marginalia within, combined with contemporary guidebooks and maps, to reconstruct this formative period of Jones’ life, with particular attention to how he represented both space and time.
Melissa Calaresu is Professor of History at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on food, material culture, and urban space in early modern Italy, in particular, Naples. She’s currently writing a monograph on the Welsh painter, Thomas Jones (1742-1803). Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume, with Victoria Avery, The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-presenting a Global Fruit (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2025).
