Lusieri’s panoramic landscapes

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Patricia Andrew discovers the best painter you’ve never heard of…

Two centuries after his death, this is the first exhibition in the UK devoted to the great watercolourist Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821). Well known and highly regarded in his lifetime, his work has been strangely overlooked ever since, despite his remarkably interesting life and his many connections with British society. 

Lusieri came from Rome, and worked there for some years before he moved south to Naples in 1782. Here, he won commissions from the royal family and from Sir William Hamilton, an antiquarian and British Envoy to the court at Naples (later to marry Emma, future mistress of Lord Nelson). This was a period when the city was full of Grand Tourists, principally British, many of them as keen as Sir William to see Vesuvius at a very active phase, and to learn about the latest discoveries in the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Roman cities buried by the great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. 

Lusieri produced numerous views of Vesuvius: it was, and still is, his phenomenal ability with landscape that really marked him out. Star of this show – and indeed, of his surviving oeuvre – is the huge watercolour he painted for Sir William Hamilton entitled The Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa(1789-91), lent to this exhibition by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is a truly stupendous size for a watercolour, about nine feet long, and (of necessity) painted on six sheets of paper joined together. It shows a brilliantly lit, calm day across the bay, with everything depicted in incredible detail – every tile on the roofs, every item of clothing on the people walking along the streets. The colouring is intense, with the bluest of a blue sea meeting the sky in a distant Claudian haze.

Few Italian artists worked in watercolour at this time, so Lusieri was something of an eccentric, especially in choosing to use it for such large-scale compositions. His sweeping panoramic scenes anticipate all-round camera views, and were also unusual, as was his brilliant rendering of piercingly bright Mediterranean light, and the meticulous attention to detail that anticipates the finicky technical perfection of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Particularly odd was his insistence on completing his paintings en plein air: most watercolorists of his day made on-the-spot sketches, sometimes with colour notes, but they preferred to finish their compositions in the studio. Lusieri, however, defied the sweltering heat to complete his views of landscapes, townscapes and monuments out of doors. His work shows something of the obsessive, and although he was perfectly able to deal with people, he was clearly a man who was interested in things and places rather than in social interaction. His figures are well observed and carefully painted, but they are never individual people with any sense of personality.

Lusieri prospered in Naples, but as Napoleon’s troops advanced he moved further south, to Sicily. Here, he was employed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, accompanying Elgin on his embassy to the Ottoman court in Constantinople. He remained in Elgin’s employment despite long periods without seeing his employer or receiving regular income. It is as Elgin’s agent that Lusieri is best known today, for he was largely responsible for overseeing the removal, packing and transport of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis: ‘The Elgin Marbles’. In fact, Lusieri undertook so much archaeological work that his time for painting became restricted, and many of his planned views of Athens survive only as drawings.

Much of Lusieri’s work was lost when the ship taking it to Britain was wrecked off Crete in 1828. Luckily, however, a great deal had already been purchased by Lord Elgin; many of the exhibits in this show are on loan from the present Earl of Elgin. With over 90 exhibits, including his only two known works in oil, we can finally see Lusieri’s oeuvre in the round, and appreciate his incredible and unusual skills. The elegant and scholarly catalogue is the first substantial publication about Lusieri in English, and should also serve to make him better known.

The catalogue of Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and The Panoramic Landscape by Aidan Weston-Lewis with Fabrizia Spirito, Kim Sloan & Dyfri Williams is published by National Galleries of Scotland 2012. 136pp., 210 colour illus. ISBN 978 1 906270 46 9