Joseph Vernet

Claude-Joseph Vernet was a French landscape painter. He is famous for his moonlight and storm scenes. He had many English patrons whilst he worked in Rome and returned to France in 1753 to undertake a royal commission about the ports of France. He was born in Avignon on 14th August 1714 and died on 3rd December 1789 in Paris.

“The Port of Rochefort” (1763)
“A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas” (1773)
“A Sea-Shore” (1773)
“A Sporting Contest on the Tiber” (1773)

1714: Claude-Joseph Vernet was born on 14th August in Avignon, France. His father Antoine Vernet was a skilled decorative painter.

1728: His father allows him to help with the painting in his workshop but he finds even working on the panels of sedan chairs not to be ambitious enough for him.

1734: He moves to Rome in Italy in order to study the masters and is particularly impressed by the light and atmosphere in works by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. He enters the studios of the whale painter Bernardino Fergioni and the marine landscapist Adrien Manglard. Influenced by them he begins to paint his own seashores and ports in a style which is often imaginative and is a precursor to the Romantics. His figures become part of the landscape which is unusual for the time which was heavily influenced by neo-classicism. He makes a name for himself particularly with English aristocrats on the Grand Tour.

1745: He marries an Englishwoman Virginia Cecilia Parker in Rome. Her father is a captain in the Papal States’ maritime forces.

1752: He paints “Mediterranean Harbour at Sunset”.

1753: He is recalled to France by King Louis the Fifteenth to begin painting the seaports of France. His father dies. He becomes a member of the Academie Royal and continues to exhibit with them for the rest of his life and even includes Italian scenes from memory. He paints “Nuit-Scene de Cote Mediterraneenne aves des Pecheurs et des Bateaux”.

1754: He begins his “15 Ports of France series” which he continues to paint until 1765.

1757: He paints four paintings entitled “Four times of Day”.

1758: His son Antoine-Charles-Horace is born in Bordeaux. (He becomes a famous painter of battle scenes under Napoleon Bonaparte).

1763: “The Port of Rochefort” is seen as one of his finest port paintings.

1773: He paints “A Sporting Contest on the Tiber”.

1789: His grandson Horace Vernet is born in Paris (becoming also a painter of Napoleonic scenes). He paints “Soldiers in a Mountain Gorge, with a Storm”.

Claude-Joseph Vernet died on 3rd December 1789 in his lodgings at the Louvre in Paris, France.

Claude-Joseph Vernet trained with his father Antoine in Avignon and also with the history painter Philippe Sauvan. However, his style was heavily shaped by his time studying in Rome between 1734 and 1753 where he was particularly inspired by the work of the Italian painter Salvator Rosa (1615-1673). This can be seen in his use of large rocks, angular trees, and dramatic and wild nature.

Whilst in Rome he trained under the French marine painter Adrien Manglard who taught him the basics of seascape composition but he became enchanted by the use of light and idealised landscapes of the French masters Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. His work fused classical and contemporary influences and he also adopted the use of including detailed human figures into his large-scale designs as he saw in the work of the roman painter Giovanni Paolo Panini.

On his journey to Rome in 1734 he visited the coast and saw the sea and ships firsthand and became fascinated by port life and coastal weather. His paintings of calm, serene harbours and violent shipwrecks were deeply influenced by Edmund Burke’s 1757 essay, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful”.

By 1740 he had established a list of patrons which included the artists Placido Costanzi and Sebastiano Conca. He also had many English clients and admirers in Rome, including Richard Wilson (1713-1782) whom he is thought to have encouraged to become a landscape painter. He often painted pairs and sets of four canvas reflecting times of day with differing weather effects and became one of the century’s most accomplished painters of storms and moonlight scenes.

His work made him into a celebrity and he was consequently called back to France, commissioned by King Louis the Fifteenth to paint the famous series of “Ports of France” leaving behind Wilson to succeed him in Rome. There he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris.

Thought by some critics to be the most famous and successful landscape and marine painter of eighteenth-century France nevertheless his fame began to decline after 1776. His work did have a lasting impact on Romantic landscapes however and the works of Richard Wilson and Joseph Wright of Derby. The French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes is widely believed to have adopted the practice of plein-air (outdoor) oil sketching from Vernet and his son Carle Vernet and grandson Horace Vernet, both went on to achieve success in French art. 

Examples of the paintings of Vernet.