Memorial to Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell

Shortly before 1722, Owen McSwiny, a bankrupt Irishman who had settled in Italy to escape his creditors, commissioned twenty-four large canvases from prominent Venetian and Bolognese painters as a commercial venture. By profession a theater impresario, he concocted this series of allegorical monuments commemorating recently deceased British monarchs and aristocrats, hoping that their wealthy heirs might purchase the works. McSwiny's "Tombs," as they came to be called, proved to be unintelligible; no one, not even the artists who painted them, ever had a clear notion of what the pictures represented.

This ornate and fanciful memorial, for example, alludes only vaguely to the subject's naval career. The admiral himself does not appear, nor does the shield in the right foreground bear his exact coat-of-arms. Only the fountain hints at the maritime theme with its ancient ships' prows and rudders, statues of tritons riding dolphins, and a bas-relief of Neptune, god of the sea.

The Shovell canvas is a collaboration by Marco Ricci, who contributed the picturesque landscape and theatrical architecture, and his uncle Sebastiano Ricci, who painted the figures and statuary. The two Riccis' use of fluffy textures and decorative colors marks the emerging rococo style.

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication_ Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries_, which is available as a free PDF <u>https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/italian-paintings-17th-and-18th-centuries.pdf</u>