Sir William Hamilton's Vesuvian apparatus

Apollo, May, 2004 by Bent Sorensen

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The Vesuvian apparatus was first and foremost part of an important didactic endeavour, but it was equally the unsurpassed prototype of a particular trend in landscape painting, which included Thomas Gainsborough's Exhibition Box, (18) Jacob Philipp Hackert's moonlight transparency, (19) Louis Carmontelle's transparencies, (20) and Charles Wilson Peale's 'Perspective Views, with Changeable Effects, or Nature Delineated, and in Motion'. (21) In their different ways, all attempted an augmentation of pictorial expression by means of artificial illumination. The effort was crucial to pictorial preoccupations in the late eighteenth century and was more widespread than has perhaps commonly been realised.

Nothing more is heard of the Vesuvian apparatus, but there are allusions to some slightly later transparencies with dramatic representations of the eruptions of Vesuvius which may be related. A brief description of the show the landscape painter Hugh Primrose Dean exhibited in Great Hart Street, Covent Garden in 1780, which included a quarter-hour performance of Mount Vesuvius in eruption, complete with transparencies, 'machinery' and the sound of rumbling underground convulsions and thunder, (22) sounds not unlike Hamilton's Vesuvian apparatus. It was clearly influenced by Hamilton and may even be a copy or variant. Dean had been in Italy from 1768 to 1779, and was in Naples early in 1774, (23) which was probably when Hamilton purchased two of his oval landscapes with figures by Fabris, (24) and when Dean may in all likelihood have seen Hamilton's apparatus and Fabris's transparencies. The painter Thomas Jones wrote rather maliciously in his Memoirs that:

   Soon after, he went to England, and
   as a last Effort, amused the publick
   successfully, with a transparency
   representing an Erruption of M.
   Vesuvius--This, like the lambent
   flame of an expiring Taper, preceded
   the immediate extinction of his
   character as an Artist--After that,
   I heard, he commenced ininerant
   Preacher, And the last account I
   had of him was, that he had sunk
   into the Oblivious, but useful
   Situation of a Mechanick in one
   of Our English Dockyards. (25)

This device--or at least the transparencies--was mentioned again six year later as: 'A Collection of Mr. Dean's Transparent Paintings of Mount Vesuvius', when it was in the exhibition rooms over Exeter Change, Strand, exposed during the daytime together with Thomas Jervais's: 'Beautiful Pictures in Stained Glass, representing the most striking Effects of Nature'. In the evening Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon was presented. (26)

The dearth of detail makes it impossible to judge the possible affiliation of Hamilton's Vesuvian apparatus with a transparency mentioned in a document among the papers of Prince Charles, later Charles IV (1748-1819), King of Spain (1788-1808), in the Spanish royal archives. This concerns a demand for payment for a certain Santiago Bonavera, who, on 20 February 1783, went to the Palacio de El Pardo to set up a 'transparente de una erupcion del Vesuvio presentado a S. A. p. D. Emerico Pini en nombre de un napoletano llamado Morghen'. (27) This may imply that either the aforementioned Morghen had forwarded a painted transparency by Fabris or that there were other unknown painters who made transparencies of the eruptions of Vesuvius.