Joseph VERNET

* JOSEPH VERNET (AVIGNON 1714 - PARIS 1789) THE MORNING Canvas. 97 x 132 cm Signed and dated lower left Joseph Vernet / 1753. Provenance : Ralph Howard Collection, Shelton Abbey, Ireland; Sale Earl of Wicklow, Shelton Abbey, Arklow (Me Allen, Townsend, Clarke Delahunt), 16 October - 3 November 1950, no. 1647; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, June 20, 1951, n°66, reproduced; Chez Cailleux, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Drouot Montaigne (Mes Ader, Picard et Tajan), 22 November 1987, n°33, reproduced. Bibliography: L. Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1864, n° C. 129 ; F. Ingersoll-Smouse, Joseph Vernet, Paris, 1926, vol. 1, under n°393-396 ; Catalog of the exhibition Le siècle de Louis XV: peinture française de 1710-1774, Toledo, Chicago, Ottawa, 1975-1976, cited under n°111 (notice by Pierre Rosenberg); Catalog of the exhibition Claude-Joseph Vernet, Kenwood, 1976, cited under n°49 (notice by Philip Conisbee). Our painting is one of the first pictures that Vernet painted on his return to his return to France, in Marseille or Aix, in 1753. It is part of a commission of five paintings by Ralph Howard (1726 - 1786) in 1752. In 1751, like all British nobleman, he decided to make the Grand Tour and went to Italy where he first visited Turin, Florence and Rome, which he left in 1752 in 1752 before going to Venice and Milan. On his return, Ralph Howard became an Irish politician. He was elected in 1761 member of Parliament for County Wicklow before being appointed to the Council of Ireland in May 1770. He became Baron Clonmore on July 12, 1776, and Viscount Wicklow in June 1785. He was a great patron of English painters mainly but also of Italian Italian and foreign painters living in Rome, he called upon James Russel called upon James Russel as an intermediary to follow up on his commissions. Among the artists he solicited, we can mention Joshua Reynolds, Richard Wilson or Pompeo Batoni who painted his portrait in 1752 (now in the J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, see A. M. Clark, Pompeo Batoni, Oxford, 1985, n°165, reproduced on pl. 155). It was in Rome that he asked Joseph Vernet for a View of Tivoli as well as the series of the Four Parts of the Day: Morning, Evening (preserved in the Toledo Museum of Art), Noon and Night (now lost and not included in the not included in the Shelton Abbey sale). Joseph Vernet moved to Italy in 1734, settled in Rome and traveled regularly in the country, notably to Naples where he found the inspiration for his numerous seascapes. His marriage to Virginia Parker in 1745 allowed him, through his through his father-in-law Mark Parker, to work regularly for a to work regularly for a British clientele present in Italy as part of the Grand Tour. as part of the Grand Tour. Vernet remained in Rome until 1753 before returning to France to begin work on the on the series of Views of the Ports of France commissioned by Louis XV. This series of fifteen paintings represents the ports of Marseille, Bandol, Toulon, Antibes, Sète, Bordeaux, Bayonne, La Rochelle Rochelle, Rochefort and Dieppe. He begins this series with the representation of the port of Marseille and takes advantage of his stay in the South of France to paint the South of France to paint the series of the Four Parts of the Day in day in April 1753 according to the documents kept by the Earl of Wicklow of Wicklow (see P. Conisbee, opus cit supra). In 1753 Vernet was at the 1753 at the height of his talent and fame, he was an obligatory painter of the of the Grand Tour and only a formidable commission from the king of France could make him leave Rome. Finally, we refer to Pierre Rosenberg's commentary on Rosenberg's commentary on Le Soir in the Toledo Museum of Art, the of our painting, when it was exhibited in 1976 in Ottawa: "It is one of those magnificent exercises of pure imagination, without any direct with no direct link to any known site, in the Claude, where the on the sea and in the sails of the ships are rendered with an accuracy of observation with an accuracy of observation that confounds. Vernet plays the contrast between the foreground with the silhouettes of the fishermen and the immense expanse of a sea and sky that mingle as in the Dutch as in the Dutch masters of the previous centuries".