Pierre-Jacques Volaire

Pierre-Jacques Volaire (sometimes Jacques-Antoine Volaire), born in Toulon in 1729 and died in 1799 in Naples, is a French painter of landscape whose notoriety is now well established.

Resulting from an big family of painters of Toulon (his grandfather was painter decorator with the arsenal, its father official painter of the city), the Volaire young person becomes in 1754 and until 1762, the collaborator of Claude Joseph Vernet for the series of the Wearing of France. The influence of Vernet will mark part of the production of Volaire, in particular its navy.

In 1762 Volaire is established in Rome, becomes there member of the Académie of Saint-Luc and knight. But competition on the market of art determines it has to settle in Naples in 1767, where it will remain from now on. Very quickly it is made a speciality of the representations of the Vesuvius in eruption. The volcano is then in full activity and Naples attracts the travellers of the " Large Tour" (English, French, Germans, Russians) which constitutes the customers of the artist. Volaire will decline the eruptions of the volcano starting from various points of view and in different formats. The success of its tables encourages competition (Hackert, Wütky, Wright off Derby, Antoniani) and gives rise to the end of the XVIIIe century to the Neapolitan gouaches (Fabris, Lusieri, Saverio Della Gatta).

Volaire thus invented a kind of landscape which is not already any more that of Vernet, is not either neo-classic, but which can qualify the picturesque one by the drama and the color which characterize it, thus preceding the romantic landscapes. As for the subject itself, the eruption of the volcano, it was appropriate perfectly for the taste of this end of the XVIIIe century for the natural disasters and the great upheavals of the world.

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