Antonio BASOLI

Antonio Basoli’s superb, large watercolours of stage designs and interior decorations may be counted among the finest and most appealing examples of architectural draughtsmanship of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Italy. In his manuscript autobiography, written in 1821, Basoli discussed in considerable detail his designs for interior decoration projects, wherein he was able to translate his skills as a scenographer into numerous imaginative and varied treatments for a room or interior space. Sometimes the artist created a room in an ‘Egyptian’, ‘Etruscan’ or ‘Ottoman’ style, or else imagined exotic fabrics and curtains alongside precious materials, marble or wooden surfaces and fine furniture. Much of his work as both a scenographer and decorator was inspired by the buildings and forms of antiquity, which he carefully studied in books, many borrowed from the extensive library of the Marescalchi family in Bologna.

This fine drawing of a neo-Gothic design for the side wall of a chapel provides for different colour schemes and mouldings on the two halves of the sheet, with a monochromatic grey and white marble scheme at the left and a more vibrant green and gold arrangement at the right. It may be posited, therefore, that this watercolour was used to present different options to a prospective patron.

This watercolour drawing formerly belonged to the noted English curator, scholar and architectural historian John Frederick Harris OBE (1931-2022). Harris served as the curator of the collection of architectural drawings at the Royal Institute of British Architects between 1956 and 1986, adding extensively to the collection to make it one of the finest in the world. He published numerous books, catalogues and articles on architectural and garden drawings, as well as organizing several exhibitions devoted to the subject in both England and America. As an obituary noted of Harris, ‘He lived in recent years in the old Laundry at Badminton…Curiously, given that he had such a developed aesthetic sensibility, his own drawings collection would often echo to the thumping sound of military band music, for which he had an unexpected taste.’