Italian surprise

It’s a rare pleasure to find an unfamiliar artist of the 18th century whose work speaks to the contemporary mind as lucidly as Carlo Labruzzi (1748–1817). I had never heard of him before this show, being still in my playpen when the last Labruzzi exhibition excited the art world in 1960. Although celebrated in his day, he was largely forgotten in the 19th and for most of the 20th century, but it’s clear from this excellent exhibition that he deserves a permanent place in the history books. Not much is known about him beyond the meagre biography that he was born in Rome, the son of a weaver and finisher of velvet, and that his younger brother Pietro was also an artist and became court painter to the King of Poland.

Carlo Labruzzi was commercially successful and achieved not only the recognition of his contemporaries but also popularity among English visitors. (Lord Herbert remarked in 1799 that the three greatest foreign artists working in Rome were Hackert, Batoni and Labruzzi.) That extraordinary Welsh painter of Italian walls, Thomas Jones, knew him. English milords commissioned him to record the Italian sections of their Grand Tours. He painted a few portraits, but he was best known for his landscapes, either done en plein air, or made in the studio from notes on the spot. He was an assured draughtsman, and a watercolourist of distinction. As Sir Timothy Clifford, who has curated this exhibition for Dickinson, observes, we tend not to think of the Italians as masters of watercolour. (Being English, we think the English invented or at the very least commandeered watercolour.) The work of Labruzzi therefore comes as a delightful surprise.

The work in the current exhibition dates mostly from the late 1760s or early 1770s and has been taken from two albums of drawings and watercolours, mostly depicting the buildings and scenery in and around Rome, with several views of Naples and one of Venice.