But as for a painting about nothing, that was not in the
future. Someone had done it already, 70 years before Flaubert wrote his
letter.

A brick wall, dull yellowish, crumbly, the side of a house, the plaster mostly
peeled off it, with a couple of windows, one with a balcony where four bits
of washing hang out to dry: that’s an almost complete description of Thomas
Jones’s A Wall in Naples. There’s also a narrow strip of painting above the
wall, divided into an area of cream and an area of deep blue – a glimpse of
another building plus sky, if you insist, though the picture doesn’t Some
foliage pokes in from below. The whole image, oil on paper, is the size of a
postcard, considerably smaller than you see it here. And the subject?

You might say that, at its most basic, the subject of any picture is the thing
that visually stands out from the rest of the scene. There’s a figure, say,
or an object, that appears in a setting, that lies against a background
That’s the subject.

(It’s a picture of a man, a mountain, a cabbage.)
Alternatively, you might say that subject is a matter of interest. Some
aspect of the scene catches our attention – a story, an excitement, a moral
point. (It’s a picture of a fight, a storm, a picture of old age.) Whatever,
the picture has some kind of focus, something for the eye or the mind to
single out, dwell upon.

A Wall in Naples doesn’t This picture lacks all focus For one thing, nothing
is happening. The washing hangs out, but there are no people at the windows.

(Siesta-time, that seems the obvious explanation.) Nor does the visible
evidence hold a clue, something that allows the viewer to play detective,
working out a narrative or an odd way of life among the absent people. And
the lack of human interest is only the start of it.

This outdoor scene refuses to become a view. The building is seen directly
across from a high vantage point. There is no sight of land, no ground
level, no base or stage to the scene.

The world just drops away out of the
bottom of the picture. So there’s no sense of place, and there’s no proper
vista, nothing for the viewer’s eye to travel over into a distance, which is
traditionally one of the main pleasures of landscape. (Nor do we get the
high-up, townscape version: a vista of many-angled rooftops, punctuated by
towers.) There is not even a minimal sense of near and far The house is
seen flat-on, not at a receding slope. Nothing specific appears beyond it.

And there is no protagonist or “central character” either The wall goes
off-picture at the bottom and at both sides It fills the view. It doesn’t
let you see it as a separate individual object, a building that’s situated
in a surrounding space, standing out like a surrogate person What’s more,
there is no topic. The wall is not, for example, in an interesting state of
ruin or picturesque overgrownness.