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A master of subtle chiaroscuro, Joseph Wright of Derby is one of the most important of the late eighteenth-century artists who define the British Romantic movement. Painted in 1780, and exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, this painting is one of a distinguished group of works inspired by the artist's travels in Italy, and demonstrates the profound impact which that experience had on his art.
In the autumn 1774 Wright travelled to Naples and the area around the gulf of Salerno, a popular destination for the cognoscenti of his generation, and over the course of more than a month visited Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Museum at Naples, as well as Virgil's tomb and the coastal grottos for which that region is famed. This picture is evolved from a chalk drawing Wright made on the spot in the Gulf of Salerno, one of two studiously observed and minutely detailed sketches of particular caverns which clearly captured the artist's imagination.
The painting shows a grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, with the figure of Julia, banished from Rome. Three errant Julias were banished from Rome during classical antiquity, all for adultery, all within about a forty year period during the 1st century BC, and all to virtually inaccessible islands. The title given to this picture at the 1780 Royal Academy exhibition leaves it ambiguous as to which of these three she is meant to be. The best known of three possible candidates, Julia, the only child of Emperor Augustus and his wife Scribonia, was the wife of the great Roman general Agrippa.
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