Louis-Jean DESPREZ

This fine watercolour is a preparatory drawing for an engraved illustration in the Abbé de Saint-Non’s lavish Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile. Published in Paris between 1781 and 1786, the five volumes of the Voyage pittoresque must rank as one of the finest books of the 18th century. With a text by Dominique-Vivant Denon and illustrations by Desprez, Châtelet, Hubert Robert, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Pierre Houel and Pierre-Adrien Pâris, among others, the book was the most complete survey of the sights, customs and cultural traditions of southern Italy that had appeared up to that time. Desprez drew a total of 136 watercolour illustrations for the Voyage pittoresque and was, alongside Châtelet, the most significant artistic contributor to the volumes. 

This present sheet depicts the Servite church of the Madonna della Croce just outside the coastal town of Barletta, some sixty-five kilometres northwest of Bari in the southern Italian province of Puglia (Apulia), which in the 18th century was part of the Kingdom of Naples. Guided by Dominique Vivant Denon, who served as secretary and chargé d’affaires at the French embassy in Naples for seven years, the artists of the Saint-Non expedition arrived in Puglia in April 1778. Travelling south along the coastal road towards Brindisi, the party arrived at Barletta on the evening of April 20th. According to Saint-Non’s travel diary, there was relatively little of note in the town, apart from the castle. However, ‘A small church of Our Lady, called the Holy Cross of Barletta, which we came across on our way out of town, was the only place that merited a stop for a single moment. One of our draughtsmen portrayed a small view of it...’ Built between 1516 and 1526, the small, centrally planned church of the Madonna della Croce at Barletta no longer survives, having been damaged by an earthquake in 1721 before being completely destroyed by another earthquake in 1830. Some fragments of the building, as well as the rose window, survive today in the Museo Civico in Barletta.

The engraving made after the present watercolour, executed by the German printmaker Karl Gottlieb Guttenberg (1743-1790/2), appeared with the caption ‘Vuë de l’Eglise de La Madona di Sta Croce di Barletta’ in the third volume of the Voyage pittoresque, published in 1783. A squared preparatory pen and ink study by Desprez for this composition is in the collection of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.

As Mary Tavener Holmes has recently commented, ‘Desprez, an architect with a talent for set design and an interest in classical antiquity…was a logical choice to provide drawings for the abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque…While Desprez may have been approached initially as an architect, it was his scenographic talents that prevailed. Far from being dry schematic renditions, his scenes are alive with action, the small figures (so reminiscent of the work of Jacques Callot, which he must surely have known) expressive and energetic.’ Other watercolours by Desprez for the Voyage pittoresque are today in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Albertina in Vienna, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

This fine drawing is one of a large group of around seventeen watercolours of Italian views by Desprez, all related to the Voyage pittoresque, that were in the collection of a Mr. P. P. Stevens of Dover in the 1930s.