Italian landscape, view near Tivoli, Joseph Wright, c.1783-86

Towards the end of 1773 Joseph Wright set off with his new bride on a belated journey to Italy. The Grand Tour, as it was then called, had become an essential part of any ambitious artist’s education, and was to have a profound affect upon Wright’s later work.
The Wrights were based in Rome for much of their two-year stay, from where they visited Tivoli thirty kilometres to the northeast. Their first child was born in the capital and named Anna Romana. Wright’s refusal to have her baptised in Rome became a subject of local gossip and he was branded as ‘peevishly obstinate’.
Made after his return to Derby, Wright’s composition owes as much to the art he saw in Italy, especially Claude Lorrain’s many views of Tivoli, as to his memory of the location.

Two Bacchantes Adorning a Bust of Pan, William Duesbury & Co. c.1775 (with additional putti)

This large enamelled porcelain is attributed to the Swiss modeller Pierre Stephan, who worked for some years in Derby. The original group consisting of three figures was adapted from a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. Kauffman was a contemporary of Wright’s, but unlike him she painted in a Neo-Classical style and was a founding artist of the Royal Academy - an institution with which Wright had a troubled relationship.

Augmentation

The landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin had a significant influence on eighteenth-century English culture. Aristocrats and their agents brought back from Italy fine examples of their work, which influenced English landscape and garden designers as well as artists.
Fertility, fecundity and wine are celebrated in this augmentation. Poussin was the master of the Bacchanal, painting complex groups of interlocking satyrs, putti and celebrants in scenes of uninhibited pagan revelry. No wonder that in the popular imagination Italy was thought to be a place of dubious morality.