(click image to enlarge)
In late summer 1925, Hunt and his wife, Phyllis, took the train to Rome and then, his friend, art critic and regular travelling companion, R H Kitson, collected them in his car.
The sketchbooks record visually that, they spent some days in Rome, then took a train to Tivoli and the glorious gardens of the Villa D’Este; on the train journey he made a preliminary drawing of this work, Haystack on the Roman Campagna, capturing the light and atmosphere, which he worked up later into the finished watercolour.
Then by car they travelled south of Rome through the Pontine Marshes via Sezze, Terracina, Itri, Minturno and then onto to Capua. The bridge Hunt has depicted in On The Way to Capua [also in this exhibition] is probably the Porta Romana with its beautifully proportioned arches spanning the river Volturno just outside the town. From Capua, Hunt sketched a series of landscapes with a smoking Vesuvius and then motored down to the Amalfi coast via Positano, Amalfi, Atrani and Salerno before finally, in October, crossing the Straits of Messina to Kitson’s villa at Taormina.
(Sketchbooks 16 & 16a)
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