Arco San Carlo, Naples

William Walcot (1874-1943) was a British architect, graphic artist and etcher. Born in Odessa, he was notable as a practitioner of refined Art Nouveau (<em>Style Moderne</em>) architecture in Moscow - which had the misfortune to be condemned later as 'bourgeois decadence' by Communist Russia. His trademark Lady's Head keystone ornament became the easily recognisable symbol of the Russian Style Moderne.

Moving to Britain in 1906 following the early death of his wife, in the 1920s and 1930s, Walcot concentrated on graphic art and was widely praised as the best architectural draftsman in London. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1913, as an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1916 and a Fellow of the RIBA in 1922. He was also an associate of the British School at Rome.

Walcot, along with contemporary Cyril Farey, was one of the most sought-after English architectural illustrators of the 1920s and 30s. Walcot developed his own impressionistic style in gouache and watercolour which won numerous commissions from Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Aston Webb. He also engaged in printmaking, creating reconstructions of ancient Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian buildings Tragically, Walcot's successful practice was ruined with the outbreak of World War II, and, in 1943, he committed suicide in Sussex.

Here Walcot depicts a busy street in a crowded city enclosed by the dense urban surround, sketched beautifully in delicate, graceful strokes bespeaking a fine, practised, classical hand. The location, as the title implies, is the Arch of San Carlo, the enclosed passage beneath the Ponte di Chiaia, an overhead thoroughfare connecting two parts of the city of Naples as it makes its way up the slope of Mt Echia, a headland jutting out towards the harbour. First constructed in 1636 by the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, the bridge underwent numerous reconstructions, and this view presents it much as it looks today. The proportions are actually correct, which wasn't always the case with Walcot's scenes. Like his close friend and mentor Sir Frank Brangwyn, Walcot believed that great architectural statements are best made at a heroic scale.

See:

Behance, Arch of San Carlo, Milan, https://www.behance.net/gallery/7873417/Arch-of-San-Carlo-Naples

Wikipedia, 'William Walcot', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walcot

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018