The Historical Association Winchester Branch: Ties of affection and service on the Grand Tour: Domestic labour in the household accounts of Thomas Jones (1743-1803)

This lecture explores the life and work of the Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones, with particular attention to the seven years he spent in Italy. It focuses on the first four years in Rome, where he met his Danish wife Maria Moncke, and the later years in Naples, where the couple raised their two daughters before returning to Britain.

Rather than concentrating only on Jones’s paintings, the talk uses the household accounts from Naples to reveal a more intimate picture of everyday life, domestic labour and family relationships within a Grand Tour household.

The lecture is delivered by Professor Melissa Calaresu, Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer at Gonville and Caius College. Her research spans material culture, urban history and the history of ideas in early modern Italy, and she is currently writing on Thomas Jones in Rome and Naples in the 1780s.

Organised by the Historical Association’s Winchester branch, the event takes place at Winchester College and offers an insight into how financial records can illuminate affection, service and social life as well as art history.