Attrib. Joseph Michael Gandy ARA Pons Fabricius on the Tiber, Rome

An original c.1830 watercolour painting, Attrib. Joseph Gandy ARA, Pons Fabricius on the Tiber, Rome.

This attractive small watercolour shows the Pons Fabricius, or Ponte dei Quattro Capi, the oldest Roman bridge in Rome, still existing in its original state. Joseph Michael Gandy ARA (1771–1843) was an artist, visionary architect and architectural theorist, who worked extensively with the architect Sir John Soane RA FSA FRS. Gandy spent time in Italy between 1794 and 1797. This painting has historically been attributed to Gandy and dated to around 1830 by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

As an assistant to Sir John Soane from 1798, Gandy was set to work on far more than the routine office tasks on which other pupils were engaged. Soane appreciated his skilled draughtsmanship and compositional skills; the present drawing, although small, has a notable sense of architectural structure, in the three-dimensional layering of buildings, bridge and background. The loose style—the way in which reflections shimmer on the water and the foreground path and figures seem to seep into their surroundings—is evocative of Gandy's 'visionary' work, in which he would conceive architectural fantasies with a feeling of the sublime. Gandy created many wonderfully inventive architectural perspectives to illustrate Soane’s work over the course of his career, and also exhibited architectural fantasies—playing upon historical, literary and mythological themes—at the Royal Academy under his own name. It is for this innovative work on which Gandy’s enduring fame rests.

Provenance: From the Collection of Dr E.M. Brett of Hampstead.