Pierre-Jacques Volaire

Bio

Volaire joined Vernet’s studio as an assistant when the older painter arrived in his home town of Toulon, to paint views of the port for his great series, The Ports of France (Paris, Louvre and Musee de la Marine). The son, brother and uncle of painters, albeit of lesser talent, Volaire worked with Vernet for eight years, so absorbing his style and technique that his early paintings are often virtually indistinguishable from those of his master. Unfortunately, this injured the artist’s subsequent reputation, as he has often been characterised merely as a Vernet imitator.

It was not until he journeyed to Rome in 1764, where he painted views of the city and its environs, and then Naples, whence he moved in 1769, that he began to develop a distinctive style of his own. During the twenty years he spent in Naples, the splendid views of the eruptions of Vesuvius that he produced, often on a large scale, provided the inspiration for landscape painters from all over Europe. The French painter Charles LaCroix de Marseille, the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby, the Austrian Michael Wutky, and the German Philipp Hackert, all look to Volaire as a source. Indeed, Wright of Derby’s views of extravagant and violent explosions (numbering thirty in all), with white lava shooting skywards, may never have actually been witnessed by the artist who, in his few months in Naples, never saw anything more dramatic than hot lava pouring down the mountain slopes. His paintings of flames and molten rock almost certainly borrow directly from Volaire, who had been an eye witness to all the recent major eruptions.

There is little doubt that Volaire exploited his skills at presenting these scenes to the full and, to vary his repertory, painted eruptions which, in some cases, had taken place many years earlier. For the eighteenth century tourists in Naples, the journey out to Portici was as obligatory as a visit to the Coliseum in Rome. The long-serving British Minister in Naples, Sir William Hamilton (husband of the notorious Emma Hart), frequently conducted such tours himself and his posting at the Bourbon Court provided him with an opportunity to enlarge his knowledge of vulcanology. In a letter recounting the 1767 eruption, he wrote: ‘it is impossible to describe the glorious sight of a river of liquid fire, nor the effect of thousands of red-hot stones thrown up at least two hundred yards high and rolling down the side of the mountain”. Another visitor, the amateur artist and collector, the Abbe de Saint-Non, wrote of the 1779 eruption: ‘suddenly, there sprang out of it a mass of burning stones forming, in their flight, a mass of fire with the very crater of Vesuvius at its base; as it slowly rose, it formed a fiery cylinder of prodigious height ….. The spectacle lasted for three quarters of an hour. At the same time, there came out of the top of the mountain a thick, black smoke which, because the air was so still, rose directly and reached an immeasurable height … These [burning stones] were thrown up in so huge a number that the whole of Vesuvius, right down to the valley, seemed aflame ….. Quickly, an unbearable stink of sulphur spread out over the environs. One could hear explosions that sounded like frequent artillery shots all the way to Naples’.

It is hardly surprising that these dramatic sights should have inspired visiting artists to try and capture the most sensational moments on canvas. Unlike Wright of Derby, Volaire was less interested in the scientific aspect than the theatricality of these scenes. His pictures often include small groups of figures, standing in wonder at the spectacle or moving to get a better view; the scale of the mountain, the awesome power of nature, overshadow and dominate the world of men below. Although some of the most brilliant light effects are to be seen in the handful of pictures in an upright format, his large scale, wide views of the mountain are the more impressive and dramatic. The greatest of these is the huge (98 by 146 inches, acquired in 1988 by the Monuments Historiques et des Sites) canvas commissioned in 1774 by Bergeret de Grandcourt when, accompanied by Fragonard and probably Vincent, he met Volaire during an excursion to Vesuvius. Recording this occasion, he wrote: ‘I was with a painter named Volaire who has with superior skills captured the horror of Vesuvius, and from whom I have ordered a painting’.