THOMAS FEARNLEY
1802 Frederikshald – 1842 München
THE FORUM, POMPEII
oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 32.3 x 49.5 cm
date: 1834
provenance:
The painter his estate;
by descent to Thomas Nicolay Fearnley 1841-1927, the artist’s son, Oslo;
by descent to Nils Olav Young Fearnley 1881-1961, the artist’s grand son, Oslo;
by descent to Ragnhild Young Lassen 1909-1991, the artist’s grand granddaughter;
by descent.
exhibited:
- Thomas Fearnley Malerier Tegninger, Oslo, Kunstnerforbundet, 8-31 January 1966, no. 43
- Thomas Fearnley, Modum, Modums Blaafarveværk, 24 May- 30 September 1986, no. 68
- Thomas Fearnley Européeren, Familiens Hyllest, Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, 22 April – 20 August 1995, no. 42
literature:
Sigurd Willoch, Maleren Thomas Fearnley, Oslo, 1932, p. 123-124, illustrated.
Following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 76, Pompeii was buried under four to six meters of volcanic ash and pumice. As a consequence its remains and history differ from other ancient cities. The site provides an extraordinary archeological insight into Roman everyday life, frozen at the moment it was covered up. First promising archeological finds were made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Awareness that they were related to an entire hidden ancient city arose during the second half of the eighteenth century. Most progress in excavation was made during the French occupation of Naples between 1806 and 1815. The Forum, the centre of civil, commercial and religious life had been uncovered in 1812-13. About twenty years later Thomas Fearnley painted The Forum, Pompeii, with Mount Vesuvius in the Distance. It shows Pompeii’s Forum seen from the north towards the south. The building with the entrance displayed at the lower right corner of the painting, is the Temple of Jupiter. The rows of white columns, visible beyond the Temple of Jupiter, are the remains of the Basilica. The red brick wall to the left is a remnant of Pompeii’s Macellum. Fearnley’s viewpoint was picturesque but it had one disadvantage: Mount Vesuvius was in reality situated behind him.
Mount Vesuvius plays a key role in Fearnley’s painting. The architectural remains of Pompeii lead the beholder’s eye along diagonal lines towards the centre of the composition where the natural landmark is towering over the ancient city. The crater’s smoke on Fearnley’s painting appears very picturesque. Perhaps he even witnessed the volcano erupting because Mount Vesuvius was active in 1834. One can only imagine how the sight, sound and smell of the active volcano must have sparked the imagination of those interested in Pompeii’s history.
The present painting was Fearnley’s contribution to a popular subject among painters. Traditionally paintings of Pompeii focus on the remains of the famous buildings, so called archeological imagery, that developed from the pastoral landscape tradition. Those works mostly contain staffage around the ruins, also painted to indicate the scale of the site. In addition to the archeological imagery, there was an increasing interest among painters to display the ruins of the ancient city as a stage for the story of the human disaster that had taken place. A catastrophe like no other, often linked to the apocalypse. Those paintings usually present the volcano erupting, displaying nature’s force and its destructive power over mankind. Figures in those paintings represent the vulnerability and transitoriness of human life when faced with nature’s force. Fearnley’s painting draws attention to its vanished occupants through their marked absence. Most of the Norwegian’s other works painted in Italy at the time do show figures. One wonders, why he left them out in this case?
From the 1830’s onwards artists showed a new interest in depicting the apocalypse according to art historian Jon Seydl. Their imagery is one of stillness, a silence established through the erasure of human presence. Now ruins appeared in their present state, but instead of an Arcadia, traces of the apocalypse are evident everywhere – in the severity of line, intensity of light, and absence of figure. Seydl refers to Christen Købke’s painting of The Forum (fig. 1) as an example. `While Vesuvius is not depicted as a threat, by intensifying the contrast between light and dark and by painting the architectural fragments in the foreground almost completely in shade, Købke added drama to the composition, heightening the sense of desolation – the feeling that, despite the bright blue sky, the site is a ruin of a ruin and that human endeavor is for naught.`
fig. 1, Christen Købke, The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance, 1841, oil on canvas, 70.8 x 87.9 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 85.PA.43
Seydl’s comment is also interesting in relation to Fearnley’s painting. According to late Kasper Monrad, former chief-curator of The National Gallery of Denmark, Fearnley had a discernible influence on Denmark’s leading Golden Age painter Christen Købke (1810-1848). Based on their remarkable similarities in working methods and the selection of relatively unusual motives in Italy, Monrad concluded that Købke must have had access to Fearnley’s work produced in Italy during a stop that Fearnley made in Copenhagen in 1836. Købke, who worked in Italy from 1838-40, painted his famous studio version of Pompeii in Copenhagen five years after Fearnley’s visit. The similarities between Fearnley’s painting and Købke’s celebrated composition of Pompeii support Monrad’s theory. It reveals how much Købke derived from Fearnley’s compositional invention. It’s an intriguing example of the intense reciprocity between artists at this time and the rapidity with which artistic innovation was disseminated through a shared practice.
Italy was considered a necessary station on the road to cultural maturity. In traveling to Italy Fearnley followed the encouragement and example of his mentor the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788-1854), who’s journey had triggered a turning point in his oeuvre. The light and colour of Italy occasioned a reassessment of Dahl’s aesthetic approach, working from life rather than the precept of old master paintings. Dahl developed an acute technical mastery which, combined with an increased tendency to work en plein air, imbued his works – both sketches and finished oil paintings – with a greater sense of realistic naturalism and the immediacy of a scene observed from life. Dahl’s influence on Fearnley is evident. Their works share the same attempt to capture and retain that sense of a live unmediated rapport with the actuality of the outdoor experience. Inspired by his mentor, Fearnley blurred the lines between oil sketches, studies and the finished studio painting. Dahl had taught him to address the motive at first hand (fig. 2) and to seek out the more humble or less obvious locations and subjects frequently studied from an original range of viewpoints, of which The Forum, Pompeii, with Mount Vesuvius in the Distance is a fine example.
fig. 2, Thomas Fearnley, The painter and the Boy, 1834, oil on paper, 26.8 x 37 cm. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, inv. no. NG.M.01750 (a detail)
The Forum, Pompeii, with Mount Vesuvius in the Distance is an elaborated study. It is executed on paper, a popular support among painters who worked en plein air. The painting is not signed and has been within the artist’s family’ until today. Fearnley most likely painted it with the intention to use it for a larger studio version of the same composition. There is no information that Fearnley painted his larger version before his sudden death in 1842. Another similar sized study (fig. 3) and its later, more elaborate studio version (fig. 4) reveal interesting information on Fearnley’s working method. Johan Christian Dahl praised Fearnley’s plein air studies especially highly. His friend’s untimely death at the age of only thirty-nine in 1842 prompted Dahl to contact the board of the newly-founded Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo. He urged them to acquire a group of oil studies from Fearnley’s estate and pointed out that there could be no better way of commemorating him than by concentrating on his oil studies, ‘as these were better than the finished paintings; here he gave of himself, as he really was, and what he felt in front of nature.’
fig. 3, Thomas Fearnley, Gauernitz Island in the River Elbe, c. 1829, oil on canvas, 31 x 49.4 cm, private collection. fig. 4, Thomas Fearnley, Gauernitz Island in the River Elbe, c. 1829, oil on canvas, 78 x 113 cm, private collection.
The Norwegian romantic painter Thomas Fearnley is in many ways representative of the period in which he was active as an artist. Fueled by the desire to engage with leading contemporary artists and artistic developments he traveled incessantly, rarely staying longer than two and a half years in any one place. In his role as a committed traveler he was a model of the peripatetic painter of the early nineteenth century. Fearnley’s talent was recognized at the drawing school in Christiana (1819-21). Norway had no art academy at the time so he pursued his education at the academies in Stockholm (1823-27) and Copenhagen (1821-23). There he became familiar with the work of two former students, Johan Christian Dahl and Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) Dahl and Friedrich were appointed associate professors at the Dresden Academy in 1824 and held classes in their studios at Number 33, An der Elbe. They shared a house at this address from 1823 onwards, Friedrich occupying the second floor and Dahl the two floors above. Fearnley joined them in Dresden in early 1829. Dresden had developed into an important hub of contemporary painting in Germany, with Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus (1798-1869) and Dahl at its center. In the summer of 1830 Fearnley left Dresden and worked in many places in Germany before arriving in Italy in 1832 where he would stay until 1835. After concluding his educational stage of his pan-European journey, Fearnley travelled to the major art centers of the continent: Paris (1835), London (1836-38), Dresden (1838), Amsterdam (1840-41) and Munich (1841-42) with a stack of motives that could be realized in studio compositions according to his assessment of the local marketplace. His work was shown throughout Europe including prominent venues such as The Royal Academy, London (1837-38) and the Paris Salon (1836).