Page 45 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

vived and in the 1770s there was only a struggling
shoot. A scandal arose, as Thomas Jefferson ex-
plained, when travellers confirmed that ‘attempting
to pluck off a branch of the laurel it followed their hand,
being in fact nothing more than a plant or bough recently
cut and stuck in the ground for the occasion’.12 While
some visitors recorded their feelings of awe others
were disappointed at finding only a ruinous mound,
covered with carved names, with a dead tree on top.
It might have been with tongue in cheek that Samuel
Rogers wrote in The Pleasures of Memory (1792), of ‘the
charm historic scenes impart’:

As now atVirgil’s Tomb
We bless the shade and bid the verdure bloom.13

Wright’s painting restored the ‘charm’, the magic Fig. 8a. BENJAMIN WILSON: Garrick and Mrs Bellamy as Romeo and
of this ancient place with its rich associations. He Juliet, 1751-1752, mezzotint.
achieved this, as with Matlock Tor, through the ef-
fect of moonlight (interestingly, his painting of the ing through the clouds outside (Fig.8a).15 (Wright
tomb by daylight failed to sell), making the warm, certainly knew this print, mentioning it to his friend
enclosed heart of the tomb glow against the dark stone. the poet William Hayley in 1786 when he was paint-
The small hill – like a miniature volcano with fire with- ing a parallel scene, of Juliet awakening in the tomb
in - stands out against the moonlit clouds, with just – Fig. 8b). The drama ofVirgil’s tomb, however, was
enough light to guide the traveller stumbling down not inspired by romantic love, but by literary cre-
the steps to the right. The tomb is like a candle-lit stage, ation and its transmission through the ages. The cave
glimpsed through the proscenium arch, with the in- suggests the world where shadows stand in place of
set scene of Silius Italicus with his book, arm up- ideal forms, as in Plato’s allegory in The Republic, but
raised, declaiming Virgil’s poetry. Nicolson noted
the theatricality of the painting, where the lighting 12. Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 20 September 1788: Jefferson
of the tomb from within looks ‘as though it were being Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary,
manipulated by some experienced stage designer’.14 Tak- Williamsburg, VA.
ing this further, Lance Bertelsen derived Wright’s
composition from prints of BenjaminWilson’s paint- 13. Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory, London 1793, p.25.
ing of Garrick and Mrs Bellamy as Romeo and Juliet, 14. Nicolson op.cit., vol I, p. 83.
1751-2, where Romeo discovers Juliet in the ‘Goth- 15. Lance Bertelsen, ‘David Garrick and English Painting’, Eighteenth-
ic gloom’ of the Capulet tomb, with the moon break-
Century Studies,Vol 11, No3, Spring , 1978, pp. 320-324.

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