After a stay in Venice in spring 1826 (seelot 38) , Bonington and his friend and patron Baron Charles Rivet stopped in Lerici on their way to La Spezzia in early June. There, Bonington made a plein air sketch of the medieval castle and port with the fortified Isola Palmaria (fig. 1), which he later worked into a more finished painting that would become the present lot. Both the oil sketch and the final painting were in Bonington’s studio at the time of his premature death in 1828. The present lot may in fact have been commissioned earlier that year by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Though he was unable to take ownership before Bonington died, Lawrence ultimately purchased the painting at the posthumous sale of Bonington’s collection, and he was later recorded as the original patron in the 1838 Christie’s sale catalogue. Patrick Noon points out that as this picture has never been revarnished it “remains one of the best preserved of Bonington’s oils.”1
The dramatic views at Lerici caused by the dangerous approach to the harbor had inspired artists since the sixteenth century: the first known depiction of the site appears in a painting by Hendrick van Cleve III (1525 - 1589) that was engraved by Phillips Galle.2 Lerici, like Venice, was also a romantic locale for artists and writers of the nineteenth century, as Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) had stayed there with his mistress Countess Giuccioli, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 -1822) spent the last months of his life there before drowning in a shipwreck in 1822. Engravings after Bonington’s view painting were popular keepsakes due to the connections with these beloved authors. Mary Shelley’s description of Lerici3 reads like a description of Bonington’s painting as well, though at the time she had only Salvator Rosa’s landscapes with which to compare it:
“The heat sets in the middle of June; the days become excessively hot...The blue extent of the waters, the almost land locked bay, the near castle of Lerici shutting it on the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the varied forms of precipitous rocks that bound in the beach...the tideless sea leaving no sands or shingle, formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes only...sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian heaven bathed the scene in bright and ever-varying tints…”
Bonington made a pencil drawing, two watercolors, and another, as yet unidentified, oil sketch of a similar view in Lerici that is mentioned in Baron Rivet’s letters. In his letters, Rivet also called the port town “the most picturesque place that the Mediterranean can offer.”4 In the present lot, Bonington added the figure of Rivet himself sketching in the shade of a stand of trees at left. The finished painting is executed fluidly, wet-in-wet, in a bold palette of blues and deep greens, in contrast to the brown, neutral hues used in the crisp oil sketch, which is more in line with the other oil sketches Bonington completed on site in Italy.
1. Noon 2008, p. 328.
2. Philips Galle after Hendrick van Cleve III, published by Theodor Galle, Ericis Portus from Ruinarum Varii Prospectus Ruriumque Aliquot Delineationes, British Museum, London, 1950,0306.2.30. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1950-0306-2-30
3. M. Shelley, J. Keats, P.B. Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works, New York 1932, pp. 715-16.
4. Ms. letter 6 June 1826, from Chateau de Lajudie Archive.