| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The development of British landscape painting in water-colours
Author: Taylor, E. A., Finberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The development of British landscape painting in water-colours" ***
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE DEVELOPMENT
OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE
PAINTING
IN WATER-COLOURS
EDITED BY CHARLES
HOLME. TEXT BY
ALEXANDER J.
FINBERG & E. A.
TAYLOR
MCMXVIII “THE STUDIO” LTD.
LONDON PARIS NEW YORK
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
PAGE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS.
BY ALEXANDER J. FINBERG 1
(1) Introductory Remarks on the Idea of Development as
Applied to Art 1
(2) The Bearing of these Remarks on the History of British
Water-Colour Painting 3
(3) The Development of Subject-Matter and Technique 4
(4) Some Famous Water-Colour Painters of the Past 8
Paul Sandby 9
Alexander Cozens 10
John Robert Cozens 11
Thomas Girtin 13
Joseph Mallord William Turner 15
John Sell Cotman 17
David Cox 19
Samuel Prout 20
Peter de Wint 21
Richard Parkes Bonington 21
Myles Birket Foster 22
Alfred William Hunt 23
James Abbott McNeill Whistler 24
(5) The Work of To-day 26
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS:
SCOTTISH PAINTERS. BY E. A. TAYLOR 29
ILLUSTRATIONS
_AFTER ENGLISH PAINTERS_
_PLATE_
Birch, S. J. Lamorna, R.W.S. “Environs of Camborne” V
Cotman, John Sell, R.W.S. “Kirkham Abbey” III
Cozens, J. R. “Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo” I
Fisher, Mark, A.R.A. “Landscape” VI
Gere, Charles M. “The Round House” VII
Girtin, Thomas. “The Valley of the Aire” II
Goodwin, Albert, R.W.S. “Lincoln” VIII
Holmes, C. J. “Near Aisgill” IX
Little, Robert, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Tidal Basin, Montrose” X
Rich, Alfred W. “Swaledale” XI
Smythe, Lionel, R.A., R.W.S. “Caught in the Frozen
Palms of Spring” XII
Turner, J. M. W., R.A. “Launceston” IV
Walker, W. Eyre, R.W.S. “A Pool in the Woods” XIII
Waterlow, Sir E. A., R.A., R.W.S., H.R.S.W. “In
Crowhurst Park, Sussex” XIV
_AFTER SCOTTISH PAINTERS_
Allan, Robert W. Allan, R.W.S., R.S.W. “The Maple
in Autumn” XV
Brown, A. K., R.S.A., R.S.W. “Ben More” XVI
Cadenhead, James, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “A Moorland” XVII
Cameron, D. Y., A.R.A., R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W.
“Autumn in Strath Tay” XVIII
Flint, W. Russell, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Autumn Evening,
Rydal Water” XIX
Houston, George, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “Iona” XX
Paterson, James, R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W. “Frenchland
to Queensberry, Moffat Dale” XXI
Smith, D. Murray, A.R.W.S. “On the Way to the
South Downs” XXII
Taylor, E. A. “A Bit of High Corrie” XXIII
Walton, E. A., R.S.A., P.R.S.W. “Suffolk Pastures” XXIV
PREFATORY NOTE
_The Editor desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the artists
and owners who have kindly lent their drawings for reproduction in
this volume_
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS. BY
ALEXANDER J. FINBERG
(1) INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT AS APPLIED TO ART
The idea of development has played, for considerably more than half a
century, and still plays, a large part in all discussions about art. And
it is obvious that it is a very useful and at the same time a very
dangerous idea; useful, because with its aid you can prove anything you
have a mind to, and dangerous, because it conceals all sorts of latent
suggestions, vague presuppositions, and lurking misconceptions, and thus
misleads and beguiles the unwary. The most insidious and dangerous of
these suggestions is its connexion with the ideas of progress or
advance. The dictionaries, indeed, give “progress” as one of the
synonyms of “development,” and amongst the synonyms of “progress” I find
“advance,” “attainment,” “growth,” “improvement,” and “proficiency.” So
that as soon as we begin to connect the idea of development with the
history of art we find ourselves committed, before we quite realize what
we are doing, to the view that the latest productions of art are
necessarily the best. If art develops, it necessarily grows, improves,
and advances, and the history of art becomes a record of the steps by
which primitive work has passed into the fully developed art of the
present; the latest productions being evidently the most valuable,
because they sum up in their triumphant complexity all the tentative
variations and advances of which time and experience have approved.
Stated thus baldly the idea as applied to art seems perhaps too
obviously at variance with our tastes, experience, and instinctive
standards of artistic values to be worth a moment’s consideration. Yet
we are all too well aware that this is the line of argument by which
every freak, every eccentric, insane or immoral manifestation of
artistic perversity and incompetence which has appeared in Europe within
the last thirty or forty years has been commended and justified.
Certainly in England every writer on art who calls himself “advanced” is
an evolutionist of this crude and uncritical type. At one time it was
Cézanne and Van Gogh who were supposed to have summed up in their
triumphant complexity the less developed efforts of Titian, Rembrandt,
Watteau, and Turner, and at the present moment Cézanne and Van Gogh are
being superseded by Mr. Roger Fry and his young lions of “The New
Movement.”
The worst of it is that the idea of development, of evolution, is a
perfectly sound and useful one in certain spheres of activity. In
science, for instance, the idea works and is helpful. The successive
modifications and improvements by which the latest type of steam-engine
has been evolved from Stevenson’s “Puffing Billy,” or the latest type of
air-ship from the Montgolfier balloon, form a series of steps which are
related and connected with each other, and they are so intimately
connected that the latest step sums up and supersedes all the others. No
one would travel with Stevenson’s engine who could employ a British or
American engine of the latest type. There we have a definite system of
development--of growth, improvement, and increased proficiency. And we
find the same thing if we look at science as a whole, as a body of
knowledge of a special kind. Its problems are tied together,
subordinated and co-ordinated, unified in one vast system, so that we
can represent its history as a single line of progress or retreat.
But art is not like science. Donatello’s sculpture is not a growth from
the sculpture of Pheidias or Praxiteles in the same way that the London
and North-Western engine is a growth from Stevenson’s model; nor was
Raphael’s work developed from Giotto’s in the same way. Works of art are
separate and independent things. That is why Donatello has not
superseded Pheidias, nor Raphael Giotto; and that is why the world
cherishes the earliest works of art quite as much as the later ones.
Yet we are bound to admit that we can find traces of an evolutionary
process even in the history of art, if we look diligently for them. I
remember to have seen a book by a well-known Italian critic in which the
representations of the Madonna are exhibited from this point of view (A.
Venturi, “La Madonna,” Milan, 1899). In it the pictures of the Madonna
are treated as an organism which gradually develops, attains perfection,
gets old, and dies. There is something to be said for this point of
view. When you have a number of artists successively treating the same
subject you naturally find that alterations and fresh ideas are imported
into their work. These additions and modifications can quite fairly be
regarded as developments of the subject-matter and its treatment. But
such developments are always partial and one-sided, and they are
accompanied with losses of another kind. If Raphael’s Madonnas are more
correctly drawn and modelled than those of Giotto, these gains are
balanced by a corresponding loss in the spiritual qualities of sincerity
and earnestness of religious conviction. It depends, therefore, on what
narrow and strictly defined point of view we adopt whether we find
development or decay in any particular series of artistic productions.
From one point of view the history of art from Giotto to Raphael can be
regarded as a process of growth and advance, from another, the same
series can be taken, as Ruskin actually took it, as an exhibition of the
processes of death and decay. The enlightened lover and student of art
will look at the matter from both, and other, points of view, but he
will realize that the theory of development does not help him in any way
to find a standard of value for works of art.
Art must be judged by its own standards, and those standards tell us
[Illustration: PLATE I.
(_In the possession of C. Morland Agnew, Esq._)
“LAKE ALBANO AND CASTEL GANDOLFO.” BY J. R. COZENS.]
that each individual masterpiece is perfect in its own marvellous way,
whether it was produced like the _Cheik el Beled_ or _The Scribe_, some
five or six thousand years ago, or like the paintings of Reynolds,
Gainsborough, and Turner within comparatively recent times.
(2) THE BEARING OF THESE REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR
PAINTING
The direct bearing of these remarks on our immediate subject-matter
will, I hope, be evident to all who are familiar with the literature of
the history of British water-colour painting.
The first attempt to form an historical series of British water-colours
for the public use was begun in 1857, by Samuel Redgrave for the Science
and Art Department of what was then the Board of Education. Thanks to
Redgrave’s knowledge and enthusiasm a worthy collection of examples of
the works of the founders of the school was soon got together, and this
nucleus was rapidly enlarged by purchases, gifts, and bequests. These
drawings were housed and exhibited in what was then called the South
Kensington Museum, and in 1877 Redgrave published an admirable
“Descriptive Catalogue” of the collection. As an introduction to this
catalogue he wrote a valuable account of the origin and historical
development of the art. Both the official character of this publication
as well as its intrinsic merits, literary and historical--for Redgrave
and his brother Richard, who had assisted him in the work, were two of
the best informed historians of English art in the last
century--combined to make it at the time and for many years afterwards
the standard and most authoritative book on this subject. But its
historical part has one serious defect, due perhaps to some extent to
the unfortunate association of science with art in the same museum.
Redgrave’s conception of artistic development was evidently borrowed
ready-made from the ideas of his scientific colleagues. He treats the
chronological arrangement of the drawings in exactly the same way as the
men of science treat the successive alterations and improvements which
Stevenson’s first model steam-engine underwent; and as he found the
earlier drawings approached very nearly to monochrome, while the later
ones were highly coloured and fuller in the statement and realization of
detail, he took it for granted that these changes marked the true line
of progress and development in the art. The early “stained” drawings of
Scott and Rooker were treated as the primitive and undeveloped models
from which the later and more elaborate works of Turner, Copley
Fielding, Sidney Cooper, John F. Lewis, Louis Haghe, and Carl Werner
were developed. Every fresh complication of technique and elaboration of
effect were hailed enthusiastically as signs of “progress,” and
brilliance of colour, richness of effect, and fullness of realization
were treated as the marks of “the full perfection” of which the art was
capable. In this way water-colour “drawing” became “elevated” into the
“perfected” art of _painting_ in water-colours, and the beneficent
cosmic process triumphantly produced paintings in water-colour which
could actually “hold their own” in force and brilliancy of effect with
oil paintings.
As a temporary measure Redgrave’s excursus into evolutionary theory must
have been extraordinarily successful. No more specious doctrine could
well have been invented to flatter and gratify all parties concerned at
the moment; the presidents and leading members of the two water-colour
societies must have found peace and comfort in Redgrave’s theory, and
the general public must have felt that “enlightenment and progress” even
in artistic matters were being duly fostered by an efficient “Committee
Council on Education.” But the theory has serious defects. It sets up a
false standard of artistic value, it withdraws attention from the higher
beauties of art to focus it upon merely materialistic and technical
questions, and, what is perhaps still more serious, it prejudges the
efforts of subsequent artists, and closes the door to future changes and
developments.
The importance of these latter considerations will be seen as soon as we
turn our attention to the art of the present day and that of the period
which has intervened between it and the date of the publication of
Redgrave’s catalogue. Consider for one moment the water-colours of
Whistler, Clausen, Wilson Steer, D. Y. Cameron, Anning Bell, Charles
Sims, A. W. Rich, Charles Gere, and Romilly Fedden, and judge them in
terms of Redgrave’s formula! If we do we are bound to confess that they
one and all stand condemned. If Redgrave’s idea of the line of progress
and advance is correct we are bound to believe that the works of these
fine artists represent, not progress and advance, but decay and loss.
Indeed, the two chief movements in art in the last quarter of the last
century, the discovery of atmosphere as the predominant factor in
pictorial representation--what may be called for the sake of brevity the
whole Impressionistic movement, and the later deliberate search for
simplicity of statement, either in the interests of decorative effect or
emotional expression, were seriously thwarted and hindered by the
demands for “exhibition finish,” so-called conscientious workmanship,
and a standard of professional technique--“real painting, as such,” as
Ruskin called it--set up and maintained by the erroneous theories of
artistic progress of which Redgrave was only one of the exponents.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that any attempt to deal fairly
and generously with the art of more recent times shall consciously and
deliberately dissociate itself from such theories.
(3) THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBJECT-MATTER AND TECHNIQUE
After what has been written above it is to be hoped that the dangers
attending the use of the word “development” have been exorcised. We
intend to use the word merely as a synonym for chronological sequence,
and we have been careful to point out that the historical order in which
artists appear does not coincide or run parallel with any growth,
advance, progress, or improvement in the artistic value of their work.
Shorn thus of its stolen finery of theoretical prejudice and
philosophical imposture the naked course of chronological sequence
presents few attractions to the enthusiastic lover of the beautiful. It
has, however, its uses. These are mainly mnemonical, for it supplies the
thread on which we string together in our memory the things strewn along
the schedule of the years without apparent rhyme or reason. The dates
will not help us to pick out the good from the bad, but they help us to
place among their proper surroundings the good things which our
sympathies and instincts find for us.
With this grudging apostrophe to the historical maid-of-all-work we will
proceed with our survey of the brief tale of years during which our
national school of water-colour painting has been in existence. The
business of this chapter is to outline the development of form and
content, of subject-matter and technique.
For the beginnings of British landscape painting we must look to the
drawings and engravings connected with the study of topography, using
this word in the ordinary sense of place-drawing, or the description of
a particular building or spot. Generally speaking the designs of the
earlier draughtsmen are now known only through the engravings which were
made from them. Roget, in his “History of the Old Water-Colour Society”
(chapters i and iii, Book I) gives a full and interesting account of
these engravings. The earliest drawings we need refer to are those of
Samuel Scott (1710-1772) and his pupil, William Marlow (1740-1813), Paul
Sandby (1725-1809), William Pars (1742-1782), Michael Angelo Rooker
(1743-1801), and Thomas Hearne (1744-1817).
Working alongside these artists was another group of men who produced
“landscapes” which relied for their interest rather upon the sentiments
evoked by their subject-matter and treatment than upon the purely
topographical character of their work. These painters of poetical or
sentimental landscape may be said to have begun with George Lambert
(1710?-1765), Richard Wilson (1713-1782), and Thomas Gainsborough
(1727-1788). Of these only the latter used water-colour as an
independent medium. His _Landscape with Waggon on a Road through a Wood_
(British Museum) reminds one somewhat of the landscape studies of Rubens
and Van Dyck, at least as regards the colour-effect and the feeling for
atmosphere. Through Gainsborough the influence of Rubens and that of the
Flemish conception of landscape painting was brought to bear on British
art, while Lambert and Richard Wilson familiarized the younger artists
and their patrons with the style and aims of Poussin and Claude. The
same influences are discernible in the works of Alexander Cozens (d.
1786) and his son, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799), both of whom worked
almost entirely in water-colour.
The works of these painters of poetical landscape taught the public to
demand something more emotional in feeling and more dignified and
impressive in treatment than the prosaic transcripts and conventionally
composed drawings of the topographers. Their example also taught the
rising generation of artists, amongst whom we find Edward Dayes
(1763-1804), John Glover (1767-1849), Joshua Cristall (1767?-1847), F.
L. T. Francia (1772-1839), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), J. M. W. Turner
(1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), and John Sell Cotman
(1782-1842), how to meet those demands.
In Turner’s _Warkworth Castle_ (V. and A. Museum), exhibited in 1799,
and Girtin’s _Bridgnorth_ (British Museum), painted in 1802, we find
these two streams of influence uniting. These drawings are at the same
time both topographical and poetical; each represents a particular place
with a good deal of accuracy, but in such a way that the drawing might
just as correctly be called a poetical landscape as a topographical
representation.
This combination of fact with emotion, of representation with poetry,
has remained during the whole of the nineteenth century and down to the
present day the dominant characteristic of British landscape painting.
Sometimes the topographical factor was subdued or almost submerged, as
in the water-colours of George Barret, junr. (1767-1842) and Francis
Oliver Finch (1802-1862), but it is generally predominant, though always
in combination with emotional or poetical expression, in the works of
William Havell (1782-1857), David Cox (1783-1859), Peter De Wint
(1784-1849), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), G. F. Robson (1788-1833),
Samuel Prout (1783-1852), William Hunt (1790-1864), Clarkson Stanfield
(1793-1867), David Roberts (1796-1864), J. D. Harding (1797 or 8-1863),
R. P. Bonington (1802-1828), T. Shotter Boys (1803-1874), J. Scarlett
Davis (1804?-1844), J. F. Lewis (1805-1876), W. J. Muller (1812-1845),
William Callow (1812-1908), Birket Foster (1825-1899), A. W. Hunt
(1830-1896), E. M. Wimperis (1835-1900), Tom Collier (1840-1891), and J.
Buxton Knight (1842-1908).
The course of development of the subject-matter of British landscape
painting in water-colour we may, therefore, say has been somewhat as
follows: it started with the object of recording as clearly and
accurately as was possible the appearance of buildings and places, and
it did this, not for purely artistic reasons, but in the interests of
antiquarian, archæological, historical, or geographical information; by
the side of this place-recording activity there sprang up a series of
painters who aimed at the production of landscapes as the means of
artistic and emotional expression; we then find these two groups acting
on each other, the poetical school teaching the topographers style,
design, “atmosphere,” and emotion, and the topographers directing the
attention of the poetical painters to the observation and study of
nature and the expression of
[Illustration: PLATE II.
(_In the possession of Thomas Girtin, Esq._)
“THE VALLEY OF THE AIRE.” BY THOMAS GIRTIN.]
their own personal emotions; and the outcome of this process is the
present school of British landscape painters in water-colours, which
attempts, both in its highest and in its lowest efforts, to do full
justice to the progressive demands which the educated public has thus
learned to make on the artist.
We turn now to the development of technique. The earliest topographers
worked on white paper, on which, after the subject had been outlined in
pencil--such outlines being sometimes enforced with pen and ink, the
general system of light and shade was washed in monochrome; the local
colours were then washed over this preparation. The method, so far as
the colours were concerned, was somewhat similar to that of tinting or
colouring an engraving. In drawings executed in this manner by Sandby,
Rooker, and Hearne the brilliance of the colours is somewhat subdued by
the grey underpainting. But this is probably due to the fact that the
artists worked only with their washes of transparent colour, relying
upon the white paper asserting itself through these washes. The luminous
effects produced in this way--in drawings like Sandby’s _Windsor: East
View from Crown Corner_ (British Museum) and Rooker’s _St. Botolph’s_
(V. and A. Museum)--have been so much admired that many living artists
have deliberately gone back to this simple way of working.
The effect of the grey underpainting on the finished work is, however,
largely dependent on the artist’s wishes. If he chooses to sacrifice the
luminosity of the white paper he can paint over his preliminary washes
with colour so heavily charged that it will practically annihilate them.
This is what Girtin generally did in his later works, though it must be
added that he also changed the colour of his preparatory washes from
grey to brown. I am inclined to think, therefore, that Redgrave has
exaggerated the importance of the use or disuse of these preliminary
washes.
The earlier poetical painters, like Lambert, and Sandby in his larger
compositions painted for exhibition purposes, worked in body-colour,
i.e., opaque white was mixed with all the colours. In this way some
approximation to the force of oil painting was obtained. Another way of
getting a similar result was to work with the paper wet. A good example
of this method is Turner’s _Warkworth Castle_. In this picture Turner
tries to do in water-colour what Richard Wilson did in oils. He gets his
effects of deep rich tone and force of colour by working with a heavily
charged brush, sponging, and wiping out the lights with a dry brush or
handkerchief or scraping them with a knife.
The methods of _Warkworth Castle_ were practically those used by the
younger Barret, Varley, Copley Fielding, Cox, and De Wint, but after
about 1830 we find opaque white coming into general use, at first merely
to give increased force to the high lights, but later it was mixed
freely with all the transparent colours, and toned or tinted paper was
used to give greater brilliance to the body-colour. John F. Lewis worked
in this way, but the hardness and glitter to which it so easily conduced
led to its abandonment by the later artists who set themselves to render
the delicate gradations of the atmosphere. Yet one must admit that in
the hands of a master technician like Turner all the unpleasant
qualities so often apparent in body-colour work can be avoided, as the
_Rivers of France_ drawings prove. At the present time some artists, who
aim especially at force and brilliance of colour, prefer to work in
tempera, but it is doubtful whether this medium can rightly be regarded
as a form of water-colour painting.
On the whole we may say that the technique of water-colour has changed
very little during the last two centuries. The chief change has perhaps
been connected with the introduction, about 1830, of moist colours put
up in metal tubes, a great convenience to artists in search of bold
effects without the expenditure of much time or trouble. But even this
has proved a doubtful advantage, and many artists have now gone back to
the use of hard cakes of colour, similar to those with which the earlier
men obtained their delicate and luminous results.
(4) SOME FAMOUS WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS OF THE PAST
In the previous section we have deliberately refrained from saying
anything about the purely artistic qualities of the works we have
referred to. This is because we have been engaged in a strictly
historical survey, and to the eye of history there is no difference
between the works of a great artist and those of a bungler. Both are
equally patent and indubitable facts. It is the business of criticism to
appraise the artistic beauty of works of art. And if in our historical
survey we have kept our attention fixed generally on the works of the
greater men, this is more the result of accident than design. Art
criticism has already sifted much of the good from the bad in the work
of the past, and it is more convenient, in a general survey of this
kind, to deal with what is best known and valued. But because history
can thus take advantage of what art criticism has done, that is no
reason why we should confuse the two processes, and it cannot be
repeated too often that historical importance or interest has nothing
whatever to do with artistic value.
The aim of this section is to make good the defects of historical study,
so far, at least, as the limited space at our disposal will permit. With
this object in view we have selected a baker’s dozen of the more famous
artists of the past, and we will endeavour to indicate some of the
qualities which make their works a joy and delight to those who have the
privilege of knowing them. In each case we will supply, in tabloid form,
a certain amount of biographical information, as knowledge of the time
and place in which an artist works and the conditions under which he
produces helps us to understand what he has done; we shall also attempt
to point out the chief public galleries where each artist’s works
[Illustration: PLATE III.
(_In the possession of Messrs. J. Palser & Sons._)
“KIRKHAM ABBEY.” BY JOHN SELL COTMAN, R.W.S.]
can be seen (when happier times bring about the reopening of our museums
and art galleries), and the sources from which those who care for it can
obtain fuller information and more authoritative criticism than we
ourselves can supply. Such information as we can give will be as correct
as we can make it, but it will make no claim whatever to be exhaustive.
PAUL SANDBY
[Born at Nottingham, 1725; entered military drawing office of the Tower
of London, 1746; draughtsman to a survey of the Northern and Western
Highlands, 1748-1751, during which time he published some etchings of
Scottish views; worked at Windsor for some years from 1752, where his
brother, Thomas, was Deputy Ranger; chief drawing-master, Royal Military
Academy, Woolwich, 1768-1797; elected Director of the Society of
Artists, October 18, 1766; original member of Royal Academy, 1768;
introduced the aquatint method of engraving into England; published
first set of twelve aquatints of views in South Wales, 1774, a second
set of views in North Wales, 1776, and a third set in 1777; died 1809.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760-’68; Royal Academy, 1769-’77,
’79-’82, ’86-’88, ’90-’95, ’97-1802, ’06-’09; Free Society, 1782,
’83.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland;
Greenwich Hospital; Diploma Gallery, R.A.; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Norwich, Nottingham, Glasgow, etc., Art Galleries.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Thomas and Paul Sandby,” by
William Sandby, 1892; “D. N. B.”; Roget’s “History of the Old
Water-Colour Society,” 1891.
REPRODUCTIONS OF WORKS: “The Earlier English Water-Colour
Painters,” by Cosmo Monkhouse; “The English Water-Colour Painters,”
by A. J. Finberg; “Early English Water-Colour,” by C. E. Hughes;
“Water-Colour,” by the Hon. Neville Lytton; “Water-Colour
Painting,” by A. W. Rich; “The Royal Academy” (THE STUDIO Summer
Number, 1904); THE STUDIO, Jan. 1918.]
Sandby was one of the most prolific of the earlier topographical
artists. His numberless drawings and the engravings he made from them
did more than any one man had done before to familiarize Englishmen with
the beauties of their native land. He was an indefatigable traveller,
and he was the first artist to discover the artistic beauties of Wales.
He worked both in transparent colour and in gouache. His drawings in the
latter medium, of which there are several in the V. and A. Museum, are
distinctly inferior to his works in pure colour. They are scenic and
conventional in design, feeble and pretentious in execution. His
drawings in transparent colour, however, are delightfully fresh and
vigorous; luminous in effect, and filled with proofs of keen and genial
observation. They seem full of air and light, vivid human interest, and
in their treatment of architecture and of all natural features they are
at once careful, accurate and lucid without ever showing signs of labour
or fatigue. In the abundance of his work and its variety Sandby
approached nearer to Turner than any other artist. But he had not
Turner’s subtlety of eye and hand, nor his exquisite sense of artistic
form. His landscapes are well composed, but on conventional lines, and
the whole material is never welded together into an original and
impeccable design, as with Turner, Cozens, and Cotman.
Sandby’s Welsh aquatints with their many daring effects of light form
the real forerunners of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” They display better
than any single drawing the width and range of the artist’s powers.
As an engraver and water-colour painter Paul Sandby is a genial and
inspiriting personality. He transformed topographical draughtsmanship
into something new and living, instinct with life and emotion. “And if
we may not call him a great artist, we may at least say that he was a
topographical draughtsman of genius.”
ALEXANDER COZENS
[Born in Russia, date unknown; son of Peter the Great and an
Englishwoman; sent by his father to study painting in Italy; said to
have come to England in 1746; drawing-master at Eton School, 1763-1768;
married a sister of Robert Edge Pine; elected Fellow of the Society of
Artists, 1765; died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, April 23, 1786.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760, ’63, ’65-’71; Free Society,
1761, ’62; Royal Academy, 1772, ’73, ’75, ’77-’79, ’81.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; Manchester Whitworth Institute.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Leslie’s “Handbook for Young
Painters”; Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; “Reminiscences of Henry
Angelo,” vol. i, 212-216; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917; Finberg’s “English
Water-Colour Painters.”]
The date when Alexander Cozens came to England is given above as 1746.
This is what we find in all the reference books, and it is founded on a
memorandum pasted in a book of drawings made by the artist in Italy
which is now in the British Museum. This memorandum states that
“Alexander Cozens, in London, author of these drawings, lost them, and
many more, in Germany, by their dropping from his saddle, when he was
riding on his way from Rome to England, in the year 1746. John Cozens,
his son, being at Florence in the year 1776, purchased them. When he
returned to London in the year 1779 he delivered the drawings to his
father.” Now either the date in this note is wrong or, what seems a more
probable explanation, Alexander Cozens’s journey to England in 1746 was
not the occasion of his first visit to this country, for there is an
engraved _View of the Royal College of Eton_, after a drawing made by
Cozens, which was published in 1742. It was engraved by John Pine, whose
daughter afterwards became Alexander Cozens’s wife. The existence of
this engraving, which has been noticed by none of the writers on
Cozens’s life, seems to point to the probability that the artist came to
England at least four years earlier than has been supposed. It also
shows how little we know about Cozens’s early life, and it suggests a
certain amount of scepticism about the constantly repeated statements on
this subject which rest, apparently, either on dubious authority or on
authority which has not or cannot be verified.
Alexander Cozens’s work attracted little attention in modern times until
the late Mr. Herbert Home perceived its beauties. Public attention was
first drawn to it by the “Historical Collection of British
Water-Colours” organized by the Walpole Society in the Loan Exhibition
held at the Grafton Galleries at the end of 1911, which included five
beautiful drawings by Cozens. This was followed, in 1916, by an
exhibition of Mr. Home’s collection of drawings with special reference
to the works of Alexander Cozens, held by the Burlington Fine Arts Club.
To the catalogue of this exhibition Mr. Laurence Binyon contributed a
valuable article on “Alexander Cozens and his Influence on English
Painting.” In this article Mr. Binyon does justice to Cozen’s
originality of design and to the emotional power of his drawings. “In
his freest vein he uses his brush with a loose impetuosity which reminds
one curiously of Chinese monochrome sketches--the kind of work beloved
by those Chinese artists who valued spontaneous freshness and personal
expressiveness above all else in landscape.” “It was indeed,” Mr. Binyon
adds, “the naked elements” (of landscape structure) “rather than the
superficial aspects of a scene which appealed to his imagination; and in
nature it was the solitary and the spacious rather than the agreeably
picturesque which evoked his deepest feelings.”
Alexander Cozens used colour sparingly and seldom. His best drawings are
either in bistre or in indian ink, and he was fond of working on
stained, or perhaps oiled, paper (which was formerly used for tracing).
Such paper has doubtless acquired a darker tone with age, and it adds to
the “sombreness” of which contemporaries complained in his drawings.
JOHN ROBERT COZENS
[Son of Alexander Cozens, born 1752; made sketching tour in Switzerland
and Italy, with R. Payne Knight, 1776-1779; again visited Switzerland
and Italy, this time in company with William Beckford, 1782; became
insane, 1794; died, it is said, 1799.
EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1767-’71; Royal Academy, 1776.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; National Gallery of Ireland; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Oldham Art Gallery
(Charles E. Lees’ Collection); Manchester Art Gallery (James Blair
Bequest).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Leslie’s
“Handbook”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: Cosmo Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s and Rich’s
works, already cited; THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917.]
It is really surprising that we know so little about this artist. During
his lifetime his works were much sought after, and he must have been
personally known to a number of distinguished people; both Payne Knight
and the eccentric millionaire, William Beckford, the author of “Vathek,”
and owner and rebuilder of Fonthill Abbey, with whom he travelled in
Italy and Switzerland, and who both possessed a large number of his
drawings, were voluminous writers, yet neither has deigned to tell us
anything of interest about the character, personality, or even outward
appearance of this very great artist. Both Beckford and Knight wrote
accounts of their travels, but one searches them in vain for a single
word that would prove that these highly intelligent men had the shadow
of a notion that the quiet and unobtrusive young “draughtsman” in their
employ was one of the greatest artists their country had produced.
We do not know for certain where or when John Cozens was born nor when
he died. Roget says he “appears to have been born abroad when his parent
was giving lessons in Bath,” but he gives no authority for the
statement, and so far as I know it has not been verified. The best
evidence for the date of his birth seems to be Leslie’s statement that
he once saw a small pen-drawing on which was written, “Done by J.
Cozens, 1761, when nine years of age.” If the date is correct Cozens was
only fifteen when he began to exhibit at the Society of Artists.
Constable stated that Cozens died in 1796, but most of the authorities
give the date as 1799.
That the artist was modest and unobtrusive, like his drawings, we may
feel sure. As Leslie wrote, “So modest and unobtrusive are the beauties
of his drawings that you might pass them without notice, for the painter
himself never says ‘Look at this, or that,’ he trusts implicitly to your
own taste and feeling; and his works are full of half-concealed beauties
such as Nature herself shows but coyly, and these are often the most
fleeting appearances of light. Not that his style is without emphasis,
for then it would be insipid, which it never is, nor ever in the least
commonplace.”
Constable was one of the first to realize Cozens’s true greatness.
“Cozens,” he said, “is all poetry,” and on another occasion he rather
shocked Leslie by asserting that Cozens was “the greatest genius that
ever touched landscape.” Yet this assertion contains nothing but the
plain truth. Genius is the only word we can use to describe the intense
concentration of mind and feeling which inspires Cozens’s work. To the
analytic eye his drawings are baffling and bewildering in the extreme;
it is impossible to find a trace of cleverness or conscious artifice in
them. They make you feel that you are looking at the work of a
somnambulist or of one who has painted in a trance. They are, I believe,
the most incorporeal paintings which have been produced in the Western
world, for the paint and the execution seem to count for so little and
the personal inspiration for so much. The painter’s genius seems to
speak to you direct, and to impress and overawe you without the help of
any intermediary.
In this respect Cozens is quite different from Turner. Even when he
trusted most implicitly to his genius Turner was always the great
artist, the great colourist, the incomparable master of his technique
whatever medium he was working in. Beyond the sheer beauty of his simple
washes of transparent colour there is hardly a single technical or
executive merit in Cozens’s drawings that one can single out for praise
or even for notice. Their haunting beauty and incomparable power are
spiritual, not material. And as we can think of a spirit too pure and
fine to inhabit a gross body like our own, so Cozens seems to be a
genius too spiritual for form and colour and the palpable artifices of
representation. Certainly no English artist relied more serenely and
confidently on his genius, and subdued his art more absolutely to
spiritual purposes. And this is what I think Constable meant when he
called Cozens “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape”; he did
not say that he was the greatest artist.
As one of our illustrations we reproduce the drawing _Lake Albano and
Castel Gandolfo_ by Cozens (Plate I) in the collection of Mr. C. Morland
Agnew.
THOMAS GIRTIN
[Born in Southwark, 1775; apprenticed to Edward Dayes; first engravings
after his drawings published in “Copper Plate Magazine,” 1793; sketching
tours, in the Midlands (Lichfield, etc.), 1794, Kent and Sussex 1795,
Yorkshire and Scotland 1796, Devonshire 1797, Wales 1798, Yorkshire and
Scotland 1799; “Girtin’s Sketching Society” established, 1799; married,
1800; went to Paris, Nov. 1801, and returned to England, May 1802; his
_Eidometropolis_, or Great Panorama of London, exhibited at Spring
Gardens, August, 1802; died Nov. 9, 1802; engravings of his views of
Paris published shortly after his death.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1794, ’95, ’97-1801.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours);
British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland;
Manchester Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums;
Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Dayes’
“Professional Sketches”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”;
B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life
and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.
REPRODUCTIONS: Binyon’s “Life”; Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s,
Lytton’s, and Rich’s works already cited; THE STUDIO (Centenary of
Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; THE STUDIO, May 1916; Walpole
Society’s Vols. II. and V.]
Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious
and artificial. His drawings were admired by his contemporaries chiefly
on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his
pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes, constantly recur in
their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and
often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so thoroughly in
keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the
two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open moorland and his passion
for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the
broad simplicity of his vision, his restrained and truthful colour, and
his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which
his inspiration could find clear and authoritative expression.
We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The
knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our admiration for
all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he
has left us, like the _Plinlimmon_, show clearly what our national art
lost by the tragedy of his early death.
Girtin seems to have mastered his art as Robert Louis Stevenson mastered
his, by “playing the sedulous ape” to the men he admired. There are now
in the British Museum copies he made after Antonio Canal, Piranesi,
Hearne, Marlow, and Morland. Of these masters Canal seems to have
impressed and taught him most. The spaciousness and breadth of effect of
all his topographical work are clearly the outcome of his admiration for
Canal’s drawings and paintings. The calligraphic quality of his line
work, what has been called the “sword-play” of his pencil, is also due
to the same influence.
His earlier drawings, made about 1792 and 1793, were, however, modelled
on the style of his master, Edward Dayes. The drawings he made after
James Moore’s sketches--of which several have been recently acquired by
the Ashmolean Museum--might easily be mistaken for Dayes’ work. They
only differ in being more accomplished and workmanlike than those which
his master made for the same patron, and in their deliberate avoidance
of the dark “repoussoir” of which Dayes was so fond in his
foregrounds--an avoidance which gives Girtin’s drawings a greater unity
and a more decorative effect than those of Dayes.
By about 1795 Girtin’s real style began to assert itself, in drawings
like those of Lichfield and Peterborough Cathedrals. From this time we
find him pouring forth an abundance of superb topographical subjects
instinct with style and ennobled with poetry and imagination--drawings
like _Rievaulx Abbey_ (1798), in the V. and A. Museum, _Carnarvon
Castle_, and _The Old Ouse Bridge, York_, both in the possession of his
great-grandson, Mr. Thomas Girtin. The noble studies for his Panorama of
London (made probably in 1801), his _Lindisfarne_ (?1797) and
_Bridgnorth_ (1802), are fortunately in the British Museum. The drawings
he made on his return from Paris, during the last sad months of his
fast-ebbing life--drawings like the _Porte St. Denis_--are amongst the
most superb of his splendid productions.
I will close these brief and inadequate remarks by copying out two
advertisements connected with Girtin’s “Panorama” which I believe have
not been printed or referred to by any one of the writers on his life
and work. The first appeared in “The Times” on August 27, 1802. It runs
as follows: “_Eidometropolis_, or Great Panoramic Picture of London,
Westminster, and Environs, now exhibiting at the Great Room, Spring
Gardens, Admission 1_s._ T. Girtin returns his most grateful thanks to a
generous Public for the encouragement given to his Exhibition, and as it
has been conceived to be merely a Picture framed, he further begs leave
to request of the Public to notice that it is Panoramic, and from its
magnitude, which contains 1944 square feet, gives every object the
appearance of being the size of nature. The situation is so chosen as to
shew to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple
Gardens, all the Churches, Bridges, principal Buildings, &c., with the
surrounding country to the remotest distance, interspersed with a
variety of objects characteristic of the great Metropolis. His views of
Paris, etched by himself, are in great forwardness, and to be seen with
the Picture as above.”
The second notice is as follows: “Thursday, 11 Nov., 1802. The Public
are most respectfully informed that in consequence of the decease of Mr.
Thomas Girtin, his Panorama of London exhibiting at Spring Gardens, will
be shut till after his interment, when it will be re-opened for the
benefit of his widow and children, under the management of his brother,
Mr. John Girtin.”
As an example of Girtin’s work we reproduce _The Valley of the Aire with
Kirkstall Abbey_ (Plate II), from Mr. Thomas Girtin’s collection.
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER
[Born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, 23 April, 1775; worked in Life
Academy, R.A. schools, 1792-1799; A.R.A., 1799, R.A. 1802; first tour on
Continent, 1802; first part of “Liber Studiorum” issued, 1807; Professor
of Perspective, R.A., 1807-1837; _Crossing the Brook_ exhibited 1815;
published “Southern Coast” series of engravings, 1814-1826, “Views in
Sussex,” 1816-1820, Hakewill’s “Italy,” 1818-1820, “Richmondshire,”
1818-1823, “Provincial Antiquities of Scotland,” 1819-1826, “England and
Wales,” 1827-1838, Rogers’s “Italy,” 1830, and “Poems,” 1834, “Rivers of
France,” 1833-1835; exhibited _Rain, Steam, and Speed_, 1844; died Dec.
18, 1851.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1790-1804, ’06-’20, ’22, ’23, ’25-’47,
’49, ’50; British Institution, 1806, ’8, ’9, ’14, ’17, ’35-’41,
’46; Society of British Artists, 1833, ’34; Institution for Enc. of
F.A., Edinburgh, 1824; Cooke’s Exhibitions, 1822-’24; Northern
Academy of Arts, Newcastle, 1828; R. Birmingham S. of Artists,
1829, ’30, ’34, ’35, ’47; Liverpool Academy, 1831, ’45; R.
Manchester Institution, 1834, ’35; Leeds Exhibition, 1839.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum;
British Museum; National Galleries of Ireland and Scotland;
Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Manchester Whitworth Institute;
Bury Art Gallery, etc. etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Peter Cunningham’s Memoir, in
John Burnet’s “Turner and his Works,” 1852; Alaric Watts’s Memoir,
in “Liber Fluviorum,” 1853; Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” and
“Preterita”; Thornbury’s “Life, etc.,” 2 vols., 1862; Hamerton’s
“Life,” 1879; Monkhouse’s “Turner” (in “Great Artists Series”),
1882; C. F. Bell’s “Exhibited Works of Turner,” 1901; Sir Walter
Armstrong’s “Turner,” 1902; Finberg’s “Turner’s Sketches and
Drawings,” 1910; etc. etc.
REPRODUCTIONS: Armstrong’s “Turner”; Wedmore’s “Turner and Ruskin”;
“The Genius of Turner” (THE STUDIO Special Number, 1903); “Hidden
Treasures at the National Gallery,” 1905; “The Water-Colours of J.
M. W. Turner” (THE STUDIO Spring Number, 1909); “Turner’s
Water-Colours at Farnley Hall” (THE STUDIO Special Number, 1912);
Walpole Society’s Vols. I., III., and VI.]
Turner’s first exhibited water-colour, a _View of the Archbishop’s
Palace, Lambeth_ (1790), is a poor imitation of Malton’s least inspired
topographical drawings. But he learned quickly. His _Inside of Tintern
Abbey_, (1794) shows that before he was twenty he could draw and paint
Gothic architecture better than any of the older topographical artists.
His pre-eminence as a topographical draughtsman was firmly established
by 1797, when he had painted such works as the _Lincoln Cathedral_
(1795), _Llandaff Cathedral_ (1796), _Westminster Abbey: St. Erasmus and
Bishop Islip’s Chapel_ (1796), and _Wolverhampton_ (1796).
From 1796 to 1804 Turner’s style changed, chiefly under the influence of
Richard Wilson’s works, which he studied and copied diligently. These
years saw the production of _Norham Castle_ (1798), _Warkworth Castle_
(1799), _Edinburgh, from Calton Hill_ (1804), _The Great Fall of the
Reichenbach_ (done in 1804, but not exhibited till 1815), and the
wonderful sketches in the Alps, _Blair’s Hut_, _St. Gothard_, etc.
(1802). In these energetic and powerful drawings he aims at getting
depth and richness of tone and colour.
From 1804 to 1815 his energies were mainly directed to the production of
his great sea-paintings, _The Shipwreck_, _Spithead_, etc., his lovely
English landscapes like _Abingdon_, _Windsor_, _The Frosty Morning_, and
_Crossing the Brook_, and to making the designs in sepia for his “Liber
Studiorum” and helping to engrave the plates. His water-colours during
these years were not numerous, but they include _Scarborough Town and
Castle_ (1811), _The Strid_ (about 1811), _Bolton Abbey from the South_
(about 1812), all three at Farnley Hall, Mr. Morland Agnew’s
_Scarborough_ (1810), _Scene on the River Tavey_ (1813)--called by Mr.
Ruskin _Pigs in Sunshine_, now in the Ruskin School at Oxford, and the
_Malham Cove_ (about 1815), now in the British Museum (Salting Bequest).
In these drawings the capacities of water-colour are not forced so much
into rivalry with the depth and power of oil painting as in those of the
1797-1804 period.
About 1812 or 1813 Turner began making the drawings which were engraved
and published in Cooke’s “Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of
England.” Between 1815 and 1840 nearly all his work in
[Illustration: PLATE IV.
(_In the possession of J. F. Schwann, Esq._)
“LAUNCESTON.” BY J. M. W. TURNER, R.A.]
water-colour was done to be engraved and published in similar
undertakings. Turner’s fame as a water-colour painter rested during his
lifetime chiefly on these drawings. Among them are many of the most
beautiful works which have ever been produced in this medium. It is a
pity, therefore, that they are not more adequately represented in our
public galleries. This remark applies particularly to the drawings in
transparent colour (like the _Launceston_, for instance, which is here
reproduced, Plate IV), for those in body-colour--the “Rivers of
France”--are nearly all either in the National Gallery, Ashmolean or
Fitzwilliam Museums. But with the exception of _Hornby Castle_ (V. & A.
Museum) and most of the originals of the “Rivers” and “Ports of England”
series (in the National Gallery), nearly all Turner’s drawings made for
the engravers are in private collections. We may perhaps allow ourselves
to hope that some time in the future a separate gallery may be founded
to do justice to British water-colours, in which such drawings would
have to be properly represented.
After about 1840 Turner only worked in water-colours for his own
pleasure and for that of a small circle of friends and admirers. The
drawings made for his own pleasure are now nearly all in the National
Gallery, where they have never been properly exhibited and where most of
them cannot be seen by the public. These formed part of the Turners
which the Trustees wanted to sell about a year ago. The drawings made
for his friends and admirers include the _Constance_, _Lucerne_, and
others of what have been called “The Epilogue” drawings. The public is
able to catch glimpses of these occasionally at loan exhibitions and in
auction rooms.
JOHN SELL COTMAN
[Born at Norwich, May 16, 1782; went to London, 1798; gained prize for a
drawing from the Society of Arts, 1800; returned to Norwich, 1806, and
opened a school for drawing and design; married, 1809; published a
series of etchings, 1811, and became president of the Norwich Society of
Artists; published “Norman and Gothic Architecture,” 1817, and
“Architectural Antiquities of Normandy,” 1822; Associate, Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1825; appointed Professor of Drawing at
King’s College, London, 1834, mainly through Turner’s influence;
published his “Liber Studiorum,” 1838; died July 24, 1842.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1800-’06; Associated Artists, 1810, ’11;
Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1825, ’26, ’28-’39; Society
of British Artists, 1838; Norwich Society of Artists, 1807-’12,
’15, ’18, ’20, ’21, ’23, ’24; Norfolk and Suffolk Institution,
1828-’33.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery (an oil-painting); V.
and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries
of Scotland and Ireland; Norwich Castle Museum; Manchester
Whitworth Institute, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Memoir in catalogue of Norwich
Art Circle’s exhibition of Cotman’s works, July 1888; Laurence
Binyon’s “Crome and Cotman” (Portfolio Monograph), 1897, and
“Cotman” in “Masters of English Landscape Painting” (THE STUDIO
Summer Number, 1903).
REPRODUCTIONS: The three works cited above, and histories of
British water-colour painting by Monkhouse, Finberg, etc., already
cited.]
Cotman is the greatest of all the English water-colour painters born
after Turner. He is the only one of them whose works can be put beside
Turner’s and judged on a footing of equality. When we compare Prout,
Cox, De Wint, and even Bonington, with Turner we feel that they must be
judged by some less exacting standard than that which we apply to
Turner. This is not the case with Cotman. He had not the width and
range, the abundance and all-conquering power of Turner, but within his
own limits he is every whit as unapproachable.
Cotman was a member of Girtin’s sketching club, and it is evident that
Girtin’s influence counted for much in his early work. From Girtin he
learned to rely first and foremost upon full-bodied washes of colour
placed exactly where they were wanted and left to dry just as they had
flowed from the brush. Cotman’s quite early works can easily be mistaken
for poor drawings by Girtin or Francia. But in the drawings produced
between 1803 and 1817, we find that he was not satisfied to paint, like
the older men, in his studio upon an arbitrarily chosen formula of
colouring. In a letter written to Dawson Turner on Nov. 30, 1805, he
speaks of his summer sketching tour to York and Durham, and adds, “My
chief study has been colouring from Nature, many of which are close
copies of that full Dame.” We see one of the results of these studies in
what is perhaps his earliest masterpiece, the _Greta Bridge, Yorkshire_
(1806), now in the British Museum. Its colour-scheme is as original as
it is beautiful. The colouring is “natural,” but it is Nature simplified
to a system of harmoniously coloured spaces, in which light and shade
and modelling are suggested rather than rendered.
The distinctive peculiarity of the workmanship of this, as indeed of all
Cotman’s drawings, is his reliance on the clear stain or rich blotting
of the colour on paper preserved in all its freshness. The aims of
representation are forced so much into the background that the artist
seems to be mainly intent on the discovery and display of “the beauty
native and congenial” to his materials. Mr. Binyon has drawn attention
to the unconscious similarity of Cotman’s methods and aims to those of
the great schools of China and Japan of more than a thousand years ago.
Among the better-known of Cotman’s drawings of this period we may
mention the _Twickenham_ (1807), _Trentham Church_ (about 1809),
_Draining Mill, Lincolnshire_ (1810), and _Mousehold Heath_ (1810);
these are all reproduced in “Masters of English Landscape Painting” (THE
STUDIO Summer Number, 1903), in which Mr. Binyon’s illuminating essay
was published. The beautiful drawing of _Kirkham Abbey, Yorkshire_, here
reproduced (Plate III) by the courtesy of Messrs. J. Palser & Sons, is
an admirable example of Cotman’s wonderful mastery in the use of decided
washes of pure colour.
In 1817 Cotman made his first visit to Normandy, and after this date his
colour becomes warmer, brighter, and more arbitrary. After about 1825 he
indulges himself freely in the use of the strong primary colours,
influenced probably by Turner’s daring chromatic experiments.
DAVID COX
[Born at Deritend, Birmingham, April 29, 1783; scene-painter in London,
1804; President of the “Associated Artists,” 1810; member of the Society
of Painters in Water-Colours, 1813; drawing-master at Hereford,
1814-1826; published “Treatise on Landscape Painting,” 1814, “Lessons in
Landscape,” 1816, “Young Artists’ Companion,” 1825, etc.; took lessons
in oil painting from W. J. Müller, 1839; removed to neighbourhood of
Birmingham, 1841, visiting Bettws-y-Coed yearly, 1844-1856; died June 7,
1859.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1805-’08; ’27-’29, ’43, ’44; Associated
Artists, 1809-’12; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1813-’16,
’18-’59; British Institution, 1814, ’28, ’43; Society of British
Artists, 1841, ’42.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Birmingham Art Gallery; Manchester Whitworth Institute;
Glasgow, Manchester, Bury, Nottingham Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Memoir of the Life of David
Cox,” by N. Neal Solly, 1875; Wedmore’s “Studies in English Art,”
2nd series.
REPRODUCTIONS: Solly’s “Memoir”; Masters of English Landscape
Painting (THE STUDIO Summer Number, 1903); “Drawings of David Cox”
(Newnes’s “Modern Master Draughtsmen” Series).]
It was not till about 1840, when he was fifty-seven years of age, that
Cox managed to break free from the drudgery of teaching. This drudgery
during the greater part of his life undoubtedly exercised a mischievous
effect upon his art. Besides wasting so much of his time, and thus
preventing him from attempting works which required sustained efforts,
it forced him to develop a mechanical and facile dexterity of style. He
got into the habit of “slithering” over the individual forms of objects,
making his rocks and trees as rounded and shapeless as his clouds, in a
way that irritates any one who has learned to use his eyes. There is
some truth in John Brett’s remark that “the daubs and blots of that
famous sketcher (David Cox) were just definite enough to suggest ... the
most superficial aspects of things,” though it may have been prompted by
envy and exasperation.
Cox’s reputation nowadays rests to a large extent on the drawings he
made after 1840. _Hayfield with Figures_, _The Young Anglers_ (1847),
the _Welsh Funeral_ (1850), _The Challenge_ (1853), and _Snowden from
Capel Curig_ (1858) were among the fine things produced by the grand old
artist during the last years of his life. Such moving and powerful
works are stamped with the sincerity, simplicity, and rugged dignity of
David Cox’s own character.
SAMUEL PROUT
[Born at Plymouth, Sep. 17, 1783; settled in London, 1811; member of the
Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1819; published “Rudiments of
Landscape,” etc., 1813, “A New Drawing Book for the Use of Beginners,”
1821, and other drawing books; published lithographs of his Continental
drawings, The Rhine, 1824, Flanders and Germany, 1833, France,
Switzerland, and Italy, about 1839; died at Denmark Hill, Feb. 1852.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1803-’05, ’08-’10, ’12-’14, ’17, ’26,
’27; British Institution, 1809-’11, ’16-’18; Associated Artists,
1811, ’12; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1815-’51.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean Museums; Manchester Whitworth
Institute; Birmingham, Manchester, Bury Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Ruskin, in “Art Journal,” 1849,
“Modern Painters,” and “Notes on S. Prout and W. Hunt”; Roget’s
“History of the Old Water-Colour Society,” 1891; “D. N. B.,”
“Sketches by Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15),
with text by E. G. Halton.
REPRODUCTIONS: Ruskin’s “Notes,” etc., 1879-’80; “Sketches by
Samuel Prout” (THE STUDIO Winter Number, 1914-’15).]
Up to 1819 Prout’s work was confined to the making of English
topographical drawings and marine subjects. They show Girtin’s influence
mainly, and they are stolid, heavy-handed, and rather dull.
In 1819 Prout went to France, and in 1821 to Belgium and the Rhine
provinces. The drawings made from his sketches appeared in the
exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and attracted a
great deal of interest and admiration, partly on account of their novel
subject-matter--for the public was beginning to weary of the numberless
views of Tintern Abbey, Harlech, Conway and Carnarvon Castles, and other
English subjects, with which it had been surfeited during the preceding
twenty years--and partly on account of Prout’s boldness of manner and
marked feeling for the picturesque. Having struck this successful vein
of subject-matter Prout continued to work it till the end of his life,
producing a great quantity of water-colours of Continental buildings,
all executed on the same general principles, and several series of
admirable lithographs from his sketches and drawings.
Ruskin liked Prout and admired his work inordinately. In “Modern
Painters” he calls him “a very great man”--which is absurd--and says
that his rendering of the character of old buildings is “as perfect and
as heartfelt as I can conceive possible.” Some people may prefer the
buildings in Turner’s early drawings, in Cotman’s, Girtin’s, and
Bonington’s works. But Prout’s work is uniformly successful within its
own limitations; it is bold, workmanlike, and picturesque, and its
subject-matter is full of inexhaustible interest and delight.
PETER DE WINT
[Born at Stone, Staffordshire, Jan. 21, 1784; apprenticed to John
Raphael Smith, 1802; student R. A. Schools, 1809; Associate, Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1810, member, 1811, and 1825; died at 40
Upper Gower Street, June 30, 1849.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1807, ’11, ’13-’15, ’19, ’20, ’28;
British Institution, 1808, ’13-’17, ’21, ’24; Associated Artists,
1808, ’09; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1810-’15, ’25-’49.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Oil and
Water-Colours); British Museum; National Galleries of Scotland and
Ireland; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Birmingham, Manchester,
Glasgow, Bury, Norwich, Nottingham Art Galleries, etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Sir Walter Armstrong’s “Peter De
Wint,” 1888; Roget’s “History,” etc.; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: Armstrong’s “De Wint”; “Masters of English Landscape
Painting” (THE STUDIO Special Summer Number, 1903).]
De Wint’s work may be described as a cross between that of Girtin and
Cotman. Girtin was his first source of inspiration. From him he learned
the value of breadth of effect and simplicity of design. From Cotman he
learned to distil his colour harmonies from Nature. As a draughtsman he
was less of a mannerist than Girtin, and he had not Cotman’s marvellous
feeling for the beauties of abstract design.
De Wint had Dutch blood in his veins, and he had a good deal of the
Dutchman’s solidity of character and stolid realism. His drawings always
look like bits of real life. They are nearer to the common experience of
Nature than either Turner’s, Cozens’, Girtin’s, or Cotman’s works. But
his homely realism is always restrained by his respect for the medium he
worked in and by his innate sense of style.
His work is well represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum by
drawings like _Bray on the Thames, from the Towing Path_, _Hayfield_,
_Yorkshire_, and _Westmoreland Hills, bordering the Ken_, all lent to
that Museum from the National Gallery; and of his famous works in
private collections we may mention _Cookham-on-Thames_, recently in the
Beecham Collection, _The Thames from Greenwich Hill_, once in the
collection of James Orrock, and _Near Lowther Castle_.
For all his “objectivity,” his steadiness of poise, his calm strength of
character, De Wint’s work is intensely personal and original. The number
of admirers of his manly and felicitous work has steadily increased
since his death, and can only go on increasing as the public gets more
opportunities of seeing his noble works with their superb mosaic of
rich, deep, and harmonious colour.
RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON
[Born at Arnold, near Nottingham, October 25, 1802; received some
instruction from Francia at Calais, 1817; studied at the Louvre and
Institute, and under Baron Gros, at Paris; first exhibited at the
Salon, 1822; made lithographs for Baron Taylor’s “Voyages Pittoresques
dans l’ancienne France,” “Vues Pittoresques de l’Ecosse” (1826) and
other works; visited England with Delacroix, 1825; died during a visit
to England, 1828.
EXHIBITED: Salon (Paris), 1822 (Water-Colours), ’24
(Water-Colours), ’27 (Oils and Water-Colours); Royal Academy, 1827,
’28; British Institution, 1826-’29.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: Louvre; National Gallery; National
Portrait Gallery (a small drawing of himself); V. and A. Museum
(Oil and Water-Colours); British Museum; Wallace Collection;
Manchester Whitworth Institute; Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester,
and Glasgow Art Galleries; National Gallery of Ireland.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Annual Register” and
“Gentleman’s Magazine,” 1828; Cunningham’s “Lives,” etc.;
Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; THE STUDIO, Nov. 1904; Catalogue of
Bonington’s Lithographs, by Aglaüs Bonvenne (Paris), 1873;
“Influence de Bonington et de l’Ecole Anglaise sur la Peinture de
Paysage en France,” by A. Dubuisson (Walpole Society’s Vol. II.).
REPRODUCTIONS: “Series of Subjects from Bonington’s Works,”
lithographed by J. D. Harding (twenty-one plates), 1828;
Monkhouse’s and Hughes’s works cited above.]
Bonington was the most brilliant of the later school of topographical
artists--those who used the full resources of water-colour for the
production of pictorial effects. The drawings he produced during his
short life--for he died at twenty-six, may be divided into purely
topographical subjects, like the _Street in Verona_ (V. and A. Museum);
river and coast scenes, like the _Rouen_ (Wallace Collection); and
figure subjects, in which historical costume played the chief part, like
the _Meditation_ and several other drawings in the Wallace Collection.
His drawings are amazingly dexterous, firm and large in handling, finely
composed, and wonderfully rich in tone and colour. His influence on
English artists was considerable, particularly on W. J. Müller, T.
Shotter Boys, and William Callow.
As he worked mostly in Paris his best paintings and drawings are
generally to be found in the French private collections. That is
probably why he is better known and more warmly appreciated in France
than in England. An authoritative book on Bonington’s life and work is
much needed. Just before the war broke out it was rumoured that a work
of this kind, the joint production of Monsieur A. Dubuisson and Mr. C.
E. Hughes, was about to be published by Mr. John Lane. Such a work will
be doubly welcome, for it will help us to realize the amazing quantity
of work Bonington managed to produce in his short life, and its
wonderful quality; and it should benefit Bonington’s reputation by
drawing attention to the large number of drawings and paintings to
which, in our public and private collections, his name is wrongly and
ignorantly given.
MYLES BIRKET FOSTER
[Born at North Shields, February 4, 1825, of an old Quaker Family;
educated at the Quaker Academy at Hitchin, Herts, where he had lessons
from Charles Parry, the drawing master; apprenticed to Ebenezer
Landells, the wood-engraver, 1841-1846; engaged chiefly on
book-illustration till 1858, after that time devoted mostly to painting;
Associate “Old” Water-Colour Society, 1860, member, 1862; painted in
oils 1869-1877, after which he abandoned it in favour of water-colours;
died at Weybridge, March 27, 1899.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1859, ’69-’77, ’81; Society of Painters
in Water-Colours, 1860-’99; Society of British Artists, 1876; Royal
Scottish Academy, 1871, ’75.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); Birmingham, Manchester, and Bury Art Galleries.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Art Annual,” 1890; “Athenæum,”
April 1, 1899; “D. N. B.” (Supplement); “Birket Foster,” by H. M.
Cundall, 1906.
REPRODUCTIONS: “Art Annual,” 1890; Cundall’s “Birket Foster.”]
In his choice of subjects Birket Foster confined himself generally to
roadside and woodland scenes, and in these he sought prettiness rather
than the deeper and more profoundly poetical emotions. His work is neat
and extraordinarily accomplished, but his style being always the same
made its many merits seem mechanical and unfeeling. Unlike the older men
he avoided the use of broad washes of transparent colour, used
body-colour freely, and finished his work with elaborate stipplings.
His standard of excessive finish, his general methods of work and choice
of subject-matter, were violently opposed to those of the younger men
who came after him. For this reason, and also because of the great
popularity he enjoyed, Birket Foster’s work has excited the animosity of
“superior persons” and æsthetes. But their cheap and easy sneers merely
mark the inevitable reaction which follows a period of indiscriminating
praise. Doubtless Birket Foster was not the great artist his
contemporaries thought him to be. But his work must figure in any
well-balanced history of British landscape painting, if only because it
expresses so fully and abundantly, and with so much technical success,
the artistic ideals of a large part of the nineteenth century. But it
also deserves consideration for other reasons. Birket Foster’s grace and
prettiness were the results of his sincere and unaffected love of the
orderliness and real beauty of the life of the English countryside. He
had a genuine affection for the themes he painted, and he painted them
in the way he thought best. Fashions in technical matters change, slowly
perhaps but inevitably, and I shall be very much surprised if the future
will not be readier than we are to-day to give Birket Foster’s work its
due meed of affectionate admiration.
ALFRED WILLIAM HUNT
[Born in Bold Street, Liverpool, Nov. 15, 1830; educated at Liverpool
Collegiate School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he
entered with a scholarship, 1848; a fellow of Corpus, 1853-1861;
Associate of Liverpool Academy, 1854, member, 1856; Associate Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, 1862, member, 1864; died May 3, 1896.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1854, ’56, ’57, ’59-’62, ’70-’75, ’77,
’79-’83, ’85-’88; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1860-’93;
Society of British Artists, 1846, ’59, ’60, ’70, ’73, ’74;
Grosvenor Gallery, 1882, ’87; New Gallery, 1888, ’90; Portland
Gallery, 1854-’56, ’60; Dudley Gallery (Oil), 1872.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum
(Water-Colours); Liverpool, Glasgow, and Birmingham Art Galleries.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “Athenæum,” May 9, 1896;
Catalogue B. F. A. Club’s Exhibition, 1897; “D. N. B.”
(Supplement); “One Way of Art,” by Violet Hunt, “St. George’s
Review,” June 1908.
REPRODUCTIONS: One in “The Old Water-Colour Society” (THE STUDIO
Spring Number, 1905).]
Of all the artists influenced by Ruskin’s propaganda in favour of
Naturalism Alfred William Hunt was probably the most sensitive and the
most poetical. He was as ardent a student of “natural facts” as John
Brett, Holman Hunt, or any other of Ruskin’s protégés, but his work was
never, like so much of theirs, merely literal and tedious. His works
prove to demonstration how little artistic theories count in determining
the value of a work of art. We know Ruskin’s theories of realism were
all wrong, but the sensitiveness of Alfred Hunt’s nerves, the intensity
and rightness of his emotions, redeemed his work and gave it an
inevitable stamp of greatness.
In the absorbingly interesting account of her father’s methods of work
contributed by Miss Violet Hunt to “St. George’s Review” (1908) the
demands made by his art on the nerves and character of the artist are
vividly described. His daughter tells us that she has seen “delicately
stained pieces of Whatman’s Imperial subjected to the most murderous
‘processes,’ and yet come out alive in the end.” Hunt “scrupled not to
‘work on the feelings of the paper,’ as his friend George Boughton used
to tell him, “He severely sponged it into submission; he savagely
scraped it into rawness and a fresh state of smarting receptivity. Yet
some of the drawings that have suffered _peine forte et dure_ are among
the most cherished assets of certain private collectors, such as Mr.
Newall and the late Mr. Humphrey Roberts.”
The “subtle finish and watchfulness of nature” which Ruskin praised in
Hunt’s work was only the raw material of his art. It was the fervour and
energy with which he subdued his facts to a genuinely poetic unity of
feeling and expression that make Hunt’s drawings so significant and
beautiful. To-day Hunt seems to be forgotten by all but a small number
of admirers, but works like his _Durham Misty with Colliery Smoke_,
_Bamborough from the Sands_, _Cloud March at Twilight_, and many others
as poignant and as beautiful, are sufficient guarantees that he will not
always be neglected.
JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER
[Born at Lowell, Massachusetts, July 10, 1834; lived in Russia,
1843-’49; studied at the Military Academy, West Point, 1851-1854;
engaged on United States coast and geodetic survey for about a year;
went to Paris, 1855, and studied in Gleyre’s studio; published set of
thirteen etchings--“The French Set”--1858; settled in London, 1860;
published “The Thames” set of etchings, 1871; libel action against
Ruskin, 1878; bankrupt, 1879; “Ten-o’clock” lecture, 1884; portrait of
Carlyle bought for Glasgow, 1891; “Grand Prix” for painting, and another
for engraving, at Paris exhibition, 1900; died at 74 Cheyne Walk, July
17, 1903.
EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1859-’65, ’67, ’70, ’72, ’79; Society of
British Artists, 1884-’87; Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-’79, ’81-’84;
Dudley Gallery (Oil), 1871-’73, ’75; Dudley Gallery (Black and
White), 1872, ’79, ’80; Society of Portrait Painters, 1891-’93;
Royal Scottish Academy, 1899, 1901-’04.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: National Gallery; Glasgow Art Gallery.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “The Art of Whistler,” by T. R.
Way and G. R. Dennis, 1903; “Life of Whistler,” by E. R. and J.
Pennell, 2 vols., 1908; “Memoirs of Whistler,” by T. R. Way, 1912;
Wedmore’s “Whistler’s Etchings”; “D. N. B.” (Supplement).
REPRODUCTIONS: The “Whistler Portfolio” (THE STUDIO Special
Publication, 1904); the monthly issues of THE STUDIO; in Way’s and
Pennells’ works cited above, etc.]
In Turner’s and Alfred Hunt’s works the multitudinous objects of Nature
are subdued to poetical and decorative purposes chiefly by the influence
of the atmosphere. But though subdued in the final result the facts were
always vividly present to the minds of these artists. With Whistler and
all those who like him were influenced by the theories of Impressionism,
such facts were less considered. They began with the study of values and
tones, and relied almost entirely on the justness with which these were
rendered, being content with a merely slight and grudging suggestion of
the objects which were veiled in their envelopment of atmosphere. The
difference, I admit, is only one of degree. But it accounts, I think,
for the difference between a drawing like Whistler’s water-colour of
_London Bridge_ (reproduced in Mr. Way’s “The Art of James McNeill
Whistler,” p. 96) and, say, Alfred Hunt’s _Coast Scene near Whitby_
(1878).
The advantage of Whistler’s method of approach is that it throws greater
emphasis on the decorative quality of the picture, the tones being
capable of treatment as a unity of colour harmonies--an advantage which
Whistler clearly realized and diligently exploited.
It was not till about 1880 that Whistler took up water-colour painting.
The _London Bridge_ referred to above was done soon after his return
from Venice. He then used this medium for some fine drawings made in the
Channel Islands, and from time to time in various places in England and
abroad, chiefly at St. Ives and Southend. It is almost unnecessary to
say that he used water-colour with the same unerring mastery he
displayed in his etchings and pastels. But the curious will notice the
use he made in nearly all his water-colours of the grey underpainting
which played such an important part in the drawings of the early
topographers. He did not, however, use this grey underpainting, as they
did, merely to establish the broad division of light and shade. In his
bold and skilful hands it did more than this; it formed the unifying
element--the ground tone or harmony--which knit together the lovely
tones and colours which made his works so charming and delightful to the
eye.
The influence of Whistler’s methods and ideals is clearly marked in the
works of men like J. Buxton Knight and C. E. Holloway, two artists who
produced a greater volume of fine work in water-colour than Whistler. We
might have chosen them on this account to take his place in our small
gallery of representative water-colour painters, but the quality of
Whistler’s work seemed to us of more consequence than their quantity.
And though both these men--especially Buxton Knight--urgently demand
fuller recognition than they have yet received, we are bound to admit
that Whistler was a greater genius than either; and that seems to settle
the matter.
(5) THE WORK OF TO-DAY
We have now traced the development in the past of subject-matter and
technique in British landscape painting in water-colour, and we have
surveyed as well as our poor memories would enable us to do so--for the
Museums have long been closed and most private collections are
inaccessible, and it is therefore impossible either to verify or renew
our earlier impressions--the differing aims and diverse achievements of
a few of those who have made our national art so glorious and so
memorable. We have done this because the careful and attentive study of
the history of an art provides the best, and, indeed, the only, means by
which we can educate ourselves to value and appreciate it. Historical
studies enable us to enlarge our sympathies and discipline our tastes,
so that the man who knows best what has been done in the past will be
the first to appreciate the good work which is being done by living
artists. He will also be the most indulgent critic of a young artist’s
shortcomings, and the readiest to help and encourage him in his
difficult struggle toward self-expression and mastery over his
intractable material.
It is not, however, our business on the present occasion to praise the
works with which this volume is enriched. In the first place, to do so
is quite unnecessary, because the works are here to speak for
themselves, or rather such excellent colour-reproductions of them that
almost all their charm and beauty have been preserved; and, in the
second place, to do so would be impertinent, because the fact that these
drawings have been selected by the Editor of THE STUDIO for publication
in this way is a sufficient guarantee of their merit and importance. I
shall, therefore, confine my remarks rather to the general character of
their subject-matter and treatment than to their individual excellences.
In this way the following observations may be taken as an attempt to
continue to the present day the survey of the past which occupied us in
a previous chapter.
In tracing the development of subject-matter in the works of the artists
of the nineteenth century we have seen that they generally gave
prominence to the place represented, with all its historical and
literary associations. Whistler was the chief exception to this
tendency, as in his work the decorative and emotional elements of the
picture itself were most prominent. Whistler’s example has been followed
by many of the living artists. Men like Clausen and Mark Fisher are shy
of any suggestion of what has been called “literary subject” or
“guide-book” interest. But though the works of such artists, from their
absence of topographical interest, seem to claim classification as
poetical landscapes, yet, if we compare them with the earlier poetical
landscapes of men like Lambert, Zuccarelli, George Smith of Chichester,
and the elder Barret, we find they have undergone a very thorough change
of character. The older work owed more to the study and imitation of the
Old Masters than to the study and representation of Nature. In the place
of formulas and motives borrowed from Claude and Poussin the modern men
give us their own interpretations of what they have seen and felt in the
presence of Nature. So that if we take a drawing like Mark Fisher’s
_Landscape_, reproduced in the present volume (Plate VI), we find that
it is, or at any rate that it looks as though it is, the representation
of an actual place, though the place is unnamed and therefore devoid of
any historical or literary interest to the spectator. Such a drawing may
therefore very well be classed as topographical, though the
topographical matter is used in the service of other than strictly
topographical purposes.
However, in the works of other distinguished living artists, like
Matthew Hale, Albert Goodwin--whose _Lincoln_ is here reproduced (Plate
VIII), Hughes-Stanton, Lamorna Birch, Wilson Steer, Rich, Gere, etc., we
often find a similar use of topographical matter for the purposes of
poetical expression, but at the same time they show a marked preference
for the choice of subject-matter enriched by historical and literary
associations.
The majority of drawings here reproduced are the outcome of their
painters’ loving and tireless effort to render the appearances of Nature
in their exact tones and colours. There is little of conscious artifice
or preoccupation with abstract design of form or colour in drawings like
C. M. Gere’s vivid presentment of light--_The Round House_ (Plate VII),
Eyre Walker’s _Pool in the Woods_ (Plate XIII), R. W. Allan’s _Maple in
Autumn_ (Plate XV), George Houston’s _Iona_ (Plate XX), or in Mark
Fisher’s _Landscape_. But though their aims, broadly speaking, are the
same, viz. the truthful rendering of particular effects of light and
particular scenes, yet each work is different from each, and each is
personal and individual, because the artist has painted only what he
liked and knew best.
In other cases, generally in the choice of subject-matter, one is often
reminded of the works of the older men, only to realize as the result
of the comparisons thus provoked the important differences which
distinguish the new treatment and justify the repetition of the same
motives. Sir Ernest Waterlow’s _In Crowhurst Park_ (Plate XIV), for
instance, calls up memories of David Cox, of E. M. Wimperis, Tom Collier
and many others who have delighted in such wide surveys of rolling down
and moving cloud. But Sir Ernest’s work holds its own against all our
historical reminiscences; it is so vivid, so evidently the outcome of
the artist’s experiences, so freely and confidently set up. Robert
Little’s _Tidal Basin_, _Montrose_ (Plate X), Lamorna Birch’s _Environs
of Camborne_ (Plate V), and Murray Smith’s _On the Way to the South
Downs_ (Plate XXII), justify themselves in the same way. How easily,
too, can we imagine Girtin or Cozens painting the scene which Russell
Flint has portrayed so vividly in his _April Evening, Rydal Water_
(Plate XIX). Yet how differently they would have painted it!
In all this one sees the Naturalistic movement begun in the nineteenth
century still at work, with its inevitable tendency towards
Pantheism--its exaltation of Nature at the expense of man and the
individual. Moralists have dwelt upon its dangers in the deadening
effect it is supposed to produce upon the sense of individual
responsibility and freedom of will. But with results like these before
our eyes we are more inclined to dwell upon its advantages, its
enlargement of our sympathies and knowledge.
But the tendency is not altogether in the direction of Pantheism. There
is a group of artists, among whom I will only mention D. Y. Cameron, A.
W. Rich, Albert Goodwin, and C. J. Holmes, which manfully upholds the
supremacy of the artist over Nature. The influence of the art of the
past has counted for more in works like Cameron’s _Autumn in Strath Tay_
(Plate XVIII), Rich’s _Swaledale_ (Plate XI), Goodwin’s _Lincoln_, and
Holmes’s _Near Aisgill_ (Plate IX), than Nature herself. In these
drawings the free-will of the individual triumphantly asserts itself.
They are what they are because their makers loved art and particular
forms of art first of all, and wanted to imitate them. Their inspiration
came from within (from human nature) and not from without (from physical
nature). But this is not to say that they are mere copies of other men’s
works, for obviously they are nothing of the kind. They are at least as
original and individual as any of the other drawings of which we have
spoken. And these artists, too, study Nature just as keenly and as
indefatigably as the realists, only their methods of study are
different. With works like those illustrated in this volume--so
different in aim and method, yet each so virile, sincere and
personal--it is evident that water-colour painting is still a distinctly
living art in this country. The British water-colour painters of to-day
are “keeping their end up” as well as our soldiers, sailors and workers
in other spheres, and, like them, they have earned the right to face the
future with hearts full of confidence and hope.
[Illustration: PLATE V.
“ENVIRONS OF CAMBORNE.” BY S. J. LAMORNA BIRCH, R.W.S.
(_In the possession of the Fine Art Society._)]
[Illustration: PLATE VI.
(_In the possession of Messrs. Ernest Brown & Phillips, the Leicester
Galleries._)
LANDSCAPE. BY MARK FISHER, A.R.A.]
[Illustration: PLATE VII.
“THE ROUND HOUSE.” BY CHARLES M. GERE.]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.
(_In the possession of E. Weber, Esq._)
“LINCOLN.” BY ALBERT GOODWIN, R.W.S.]
[Illustration: PLATE IX.
“NEAR AISGILL.” BY C. J. HOLMES.
(_In the possession of D. M. Carnegie, Esq._)]
[Illustration: PLATE X.
“TIDAL BASIN, MONTROSE.” BY ROBERT LITTLE, R.W.S., R.S.W.]
[Illustration: PLATE XI.
“SWALEDALE.” BY ALFRED W. RICH.]
[Illustration: PLATE XII.
“CAUGHT IN THE FROZEN PALMS OF SPRING.” BY LIONEL SMYTHE, R.A., R.W.S.
(_In the possession of W. Lawrence Smith, Esq._)]
[Illustration: PLATE XIII.
“A POOL IN THE WOODS.” BY W. EYRE WALKER, R.W.S.]
[Illustration: PLATE XIV.
“IN CROWHURST PARK, SUSSEX.” BY SIR E. A. WATERLOW, R.A., R.W.S.,
H.R.S.W.]
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS: SCOTTISH
PAINTERS. BY E. A. TAYLOR
To lift the veil enshrouding the past and, though but dimly, recall its
artists’ lives and works may appeal to a few only. The secrets of the
great are already known; their deeds, as modern times desire, will be
more rapidly found tabulated in any biographical dictionary; those whom
chance and fate have less favoured will serve no other purpose than that
of a poor remembrance. Nevertheless to separate those who followed the
ways of art in other than water-colour landscape painting, I must recall
some at least whose influence of mind and work aided to attain in
Scotland the important position it commands to-day. Amongst the first
connected with landscape painting the names of John and Robert Norie
cannot fairly be omitted. Carrying on a business in Edinburgh at the
beginning of the eighteenth century as house painters and decorators, it
was in their decorative schemes that landscape played the most
significant part, a form of decoration of considerable fashion in the
Scottish capital at that time, and applied in various ways to doors,
panels, mantelpieces, etc., of private houses; and apart from their
business, both father and sons painted some landscapes of no mean order.
It was in their workshops, too, that some afterwards notable artists, in
their early life, served as apprentices, famous amongst them being
Alexander Runciman (1736-1785), John Wilson (1774-1855), and James Howe
(1780-1836).
Landscape painting, however, apart from such as was utilized in
decorative schemes, had little or no public appreciators. Portraits and
deeds of tragedy and valour seemed to occupy the artists’ minds; yet,
like the curlew’s haunting note on loch and mountain side, there was an
influence astir towards more peaceful scenes, a call that knew no
limited geography, no definite law. In Ayrshire, Robert Burns
(1759-1796) was weaving his nature songs; while Alexander Nasmyth
(1758-1840), in Midlothian, was preparing his palette to capture similar
themes in paint. But perhaps the greatest impetus given to a wider
public appreciation of the scenery of his own country was the
publication in 1810 of Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” followed
in 1814 by his more distinguished “Waverley Novels.” Yet previous to
that universal awakening, in 1793 Alexander Nasmyth resigned his
portrait and figure work for that of landscape, and it is from that
period that this branch of painting in oils most vigorously commenced;
while apart from the use of water-colour by topographical artists,
perhaps the first few landscapes of importance were of a slightly
earlier date, by the renowned architect Robert Adam (1728-1792). Not,
however, until the time of Hugh William Williams (1773-1829) did the art
become more pictorially practised. As Nasmyth has been credited with
being the father of Scottish landscape painting in oils, Hugh William
Williams might be more universally noted as, if not the father, at least
one of the principal pioneers of landscape painting in water-colours.
Taking a short extract from a criticism of an exhibition of his work in
that medium opened in Edinburgh in 1822, the writer states: “There is
room for more unqualified praise than in the works of any single artist
in landscape painting to which this country has yet given birth.”
Williams, however, was of Welsh parentage and born on board his father’s
ship when at sea, his early upbringing being entrusted to an Italian
grandfather in Edinburgh, where his name as an exhibitor and
water-colour painter became prominent in 1810. His successes at that
time enabled him to undertake a long sojourn in Italy and Greece, of
which he published an account in 1820 illustrated with engravings and
some of his own drawings, following it up with his exhibition in 1822
almost entirely composed of work done during his continental travels.
Artistically his paintings are distinctly personal, and technically they
are treated with broad simple washes over delicately outlined
compositions. Another artist of the period remembered for his
water-colour work was Andrew Wilson, born in Edinburgh (1780-1848), who,
after a varied art life in Italy and England, occupied the post of
master in the Trustees Academy of his native city in 1818. It was during
this year that the remarkable David Roberts, who is said to have had a
week’s tuition under Wilson, started to exhibit his famed architectural
subjects; while a few years later Andrew Donaldson, whose work in the
style of Prout, and little known beyond Glasgow, contributed in no
slight degree to the advancement of water-colour painting in that city.
It was not, however, until 1832 that the water-colour landscapes of
William Leighton Leitch began to make their public appearance, and
biographical records place this artist and Williams as the two most
prominent water-colour painters in Scotland in those days. From a
Glasgow weaver to house-painter and scene-painter, ultimately
instructing the Queen and other members of the Royal Household, Leitch’s
life was certainly inspiring to young enthusiasts, and his work being of
rather the “pretty” order was undoubtedly popular. But England claimed
the later and more important days of his life.
To revive more distinctly local Scottish memories one must turn to the
name of Thomas Fairbairn (1821-1885). Originally a shop-lad with a firm
of dyers in Glasgow, Fairbairn had no rose-paved road to travel to
attain his desires, and it is by his sketches of old houses and
localities around Glasgow that he at first became known, and latterly by
his literal paintings of forest scenery. Attracted by the wealth of
subject at Cadzow, in Hamilton, it was there that in 1852 he met Sam
Bough, who greatly influenced his further artistic outlook, as the
English borderer did that of many other painters, and who twenty-three
years later was lauded as being one of the most important figures in
Scottish art.
Another prominent artist at the time was J. Crawford Wintour (1825-1882)
who, though chiefly concerned with oil painting, showed his rarest
artistic achievements in water-colour landscapes. To him and Bough the
credit is due for creating a greater interest in that medium and branch
of art than it had hitherto enjoyed. Nevertheless the various
exhibitions gave but scanty appreciation to the water-colour painters.
In their organizers’ minds the medium employed seemed to be rated higher
than a work of art, despite water-colour being the one almost entirely
employed by the supreme artists of China and Japan. Works in it were
exhibitionally a little less than ignored, with the result that in
Glasgow on December 21, 1877, ten enthusiasts held the first preliminary
meeting of the now important Royal Scottish Society of Painters in
Water-Colours. The only member of that faithful gathering now living is
the Society’s present Vice-President, A. K. Brown, R.S.A. It was not,
however, until two months later that the Society was definitely formed,
due to the proposition of Sir Francis Powell and seconded by William
McTaggart, Powell being elected its first president and the virile Sam
Bough vice-president on March 4, 1878. In November of the same year the
new Society held its first exhibition in which 172 pictures were shown;
and in February 1888, as the only representative art body of its kind in
Scotland, it was empowered to use the prefix “Royal.” Its present
membership numbers seventy-nine, of which eight are honorary, under the
presidency of E. A. Walton, R.S.A. That the Society has been the means
of promoting a wider public interest in water-colour painting in
Scotland has been clearly evinced, and of recent years its exhibitions
(now and again not entirely confined to the work of its members) have
unquestionably stimulated a general interest in the art. Yet the day
seems still far off when a more united appreciation will be based on a
picture as a work of art, regardless of the value placed upon the medium
in which it is produced.
In comparison with the old water-colourists’ slightly tinted drawings, p
the chief elements most markedly notable in the modern development are
the more extensively varied methods employed, aided considerably by the
scientifically discovered greater range and assured permanency of
pigments and materials. Technically, I think, the art of painting is
closely allied to the art of acting; the actor utilizes voice and
make-up according to the emotions and character he wishes to express, in
the same way that the painter’s subject and thought to be fully
indicated call for a process and technique affinitive with them. Within
recent years it became the fashion amongst water-colour artists to
strain the medium beyond its limited powers, the result being heavily
framed works competing in a feeble way with oils, and subjects that
would certainly have been better rendered artistically had this medium
been employed.
With the exception of the work of De Wint and Cox, the greatest
influence recognizable in the work of many of the Scottish
water-colourists is of Dutch origin and easily traced to such masters as
Anton Mauve, Josef Israëls, Bosboom and the Maris brothers; so much so
in fact that with certain artists it has been difficult to discern the
difference between many of their own paintings and those of the men by
whom they were so obviously inspired. The method employed was as
follows: after the drawing had been roughly suggested, the paper was
submitted to a tubbing and scrubbing, so that the colour ate its way in
until finally more direct and stronger touches were applied, desired
lighter portions being wiped out while wet, or slicked up with a little
body-colour. The method, though losing much that is inherently beautiful
in water-colour, is nevertheless one which most aptly suggests certain
phases of landscape dealing with poetic sentiment and mystery.
The one perfect artist in Scotland who most originally adopted the
process was Arthur Melville (1855-1904). What good there was in it he
certainly extracted; Melville, too, seldom resorted to the aid of
body-colour. I have known him, if unsatisfied with any portion of his
painting, to deliberately cut it out and dexterously insert a fresh
piece of paper, and much trouble and experience went to bring about the
apparent ease with which his work appears to have been done.
Another method extremely popular with some artists, though perhaps
practised more on the Continent, was the almost entire use of
body-colour on a tinted ground, a method which brings water-colour
painting into a closer relation to that of oils. In other than capable
hands it has a tendency to lack freshness, giving an opaque and chalky
quality to the work. But when used by a few artists in this country who
have fully realized its possibilities and limitations, some excellent
results have been achieved, pre-eminent amongst them being those by the
Newcastle artist, Joseph Crawhall, by whom his many Scottish associates
were inspired to a remarkable degree. His paintings, principally of
birds and animal life, in the various exhibitions were always
outstanding, and to-day there is little if any work of this character
being done that can surpass it.
Water-colour, however, used direct without the assistance of scrubbing,
scraping and body-colour shows without question the medium at its best.
As a process used in what is termed the purist’s method, there certainly
is no other that can compete with it for affinitive landscapes, and what
has been done even experimentally in it, by other than water-colour
artists, represents, perhaps, the finest examples of genuine art they
have left us. With the exception of the short-lived George Manson
(1850-1876), Tom Scott, R.S.A., R. B. Nisbet, R.S.A., and Ewen Geddes,
R.S.W., one might safely say that all the Scottish water-colourists are
equally conversant with oils, though in recent years Nisbet has been
devoting much of his time to the latter medium.
Perhaps the first artist in Scotland to realize the brilliancy of Nature
in water-colour was the late William McTaggart (1835-1910); his
landscapes are all veritably untricked effects of the land’s and sea’s
sunlit and wind-swept moods in which his spontaneous and untrammelled
method aided to a considerable extent his ability to maintain the high
artistic quality of his pictures in oils.
A less vivid outlook attracts the essentially water-colour artist, R. B.
Nisbet, his landscapes being almost exclusively low-toned aspects of
Nature, and technically similar to the works of the previously mentioned
Dutch masters. Universally his work has been vastly appreciated and
probably he can claim more official honours than any other Scottish
water-colour painter. Not a few of the younger men owe some of the rarer
qualities in their work to his sympathetic influence.
In companionship with Nisbet, Tom Scott is probably now, with the
exception of Ewen Geddes, the only entirely water-colour painter in
Scotland. His _motifs_, however, being chiefly inspired by the glamour
surrounding the Borderland, are more of a figured historical nature, but
not the least emotional pleasure is derived from their distinctive
landscape settings.
Incidentally humble crofts and lowland scenery attract the artist in
Ewen Geddes, and as a painter of snow landscapes, I doubt if there is
another water-colourist who as sensitively portrays the spirit of the
wintry day. But to pick and choose from amongst the many artists whose
work entitles them to be more than briefly mentioned, regardless of
individual precedence, one may not omit W. Y. MacGregor, A.R.S.A., whose
inspiring enthusiasm as father of the famed Glasgow School of Painters
is historically honoured, and whose latter-day charcoal and water-colour
landscapes are not the least distinctive expressions of genuine art;
while amongst younger men, prominently known, are the distinguished
exponent C. H. Mackie, R.S.A., R.S.W., whose work and ideas declared in
various mediums are extremely invigorating, and J. Hamilton Mackenzie,
R.S.W., A.R.E., who, as well as a painter in oils, pastellist and
etcher, is an admirable water-colourist. To further enumerate one must
include the names of such personal landscape artists as J. Whitelaw
Hamilton, A.R.S.A., R.S.W., Archibald Kay, A.R.S.A., R.S.W., T.M. Hay,
R.S.W., Alexander MacBride, R.I., R.S.W., Stanley Cursiter, R.S.W.,
James Herald, and Stewart Orr.
But to deal more minutely with the artists who are here represented, A.
K. Brown (Plate XVI) must take precedence for his untiring services
rendered to the promotion of the delightful art of water-colour painting
in Scotland. Though born in Edinburgh in 1849, it has been in Glasgow
that the greater part of his life has been lived, and with the art
affairs of that city he has been most directly connected. His early
years were spent there as a calico-print designer, the artistic
relationship of which soon led him to the higher ideal of landscape
painting, the hills and glens as seen from a moorland road or mountain
burn being the themes that most intimately allured him; yet not that
aspect of the rugged inhumanity of the hills, but where man has trod,
and where the shepherd’s whistle may be familiarly heard. It is, too,
that sensation of friendliness felt amongst the hills that pervades his
works. Treated with a methodical tenderness, they never exhibitionally
assert themselves, but must be seen singly to convey their full
attractiveness.
In early association next to A. K. Brown would be R. W. Allan, born in
Glasgow in 1852 (Plate XV). In his young days, inspired by his father
who was a well-known lithographer in the city, he certainly had not the
usual students’ struggles to contend with, and was soon one of the few
Scottish painters in water-colour who fully realized the beauty of the
unsullied quality the medium possessed, by his broad decisive handling
in comparison with the prevalent minute finish indulged in. It is now,
however, about thirty-five years since he left his native city for
London, where he has not only become a distinguished painter in oils,
but also a prominent member of the “Old” Water-Colour Society.
Two years later than R. W. Allan, James Paterson (Plate XXI) was born in
Glasgow, and is noted there as one of the first artists energetically
active, with W. Y. MacGregor, in forming a bolder style of painting than
had been previously fashionable, and who, with the grouping of a few
other enthusiasts later, became known to the art world as the Glasgow
School of Painters. Their revolutionary aims and ideals influenced to a
remarkable extent artists and painting in general throughout Scotland.
Though equally well known as a painter of the figure and occasional
portraits, it is as a landscapist that Paterson’s reputation has been
most uniquely established, his present Dumfriesshire home providing him
extensively with subjects in harmony with his earlier technically broad
sympathies.
Not so closely connected with the Glasgow School movement as James
Paterson, James Cadenhead, born in Aberdeen in 1858 (Plate XVII), became
somewhat imbued with its views. Like the majority of now celebrated
water-colourists, oil painting claimed his first attention. Less
realistic in outlook than his brother artists, his work assumed a more
conceptionally decorative tendency and displayed a flat treatment,
technically similar to that which one associates with the landscape
artists of Japan. It was by such individual features that attention was
drawn to his work, and in 1893 he was elected a member of the Royal
Scottish Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and nine years later an
associate of the Royal Scottish Academy, where, in both exhibitions, his
work shares with that of other leading artists a distinctive admiration.
Turning to the illustration _Suffolk Pastures_, by E. A. Walton (Plate
XXIV), one finds the work of an artist whose ability as a painter is
unanimously respected amongst his fellows. Born in Renfrewshire in 1860,
he is also one who has been historically associated with the
revolutionary Glasgow School; originally a landscape artist, he is
nevertheless one of the leading Scottish portrait painters. But to
confine my appreciation to his landscape work, it is with a lingering
doubt whether it be his examples in oils or water-colours which are the
more enticing if a choice were demanded. It is probably to his work in
the gentler medium I would assign the talent of the man and the artist
as being most completely revealed, especially favouring those drawings
executed on a grey-brown millboard, or some other similarly tinted
paper, with which his skilful use of body-colour mingles and expresses
his prenurtured vision of design and colour harmonies for which he is so
greatly esteemed.
Five years later than E. A. Walton, D. Y. Cameron was born in Glasgow
(Plate XVIII). With the exception of Muirhead Bone, there is no other
Scottish artist whose pre-eminence as an etcher is as universally
admitted. Within recent years his reputation as a painter has been
rapidly becoming as widely acknowledged. In his early etchings, oils,
and water-colours, though previous masters’ influences were easily
detected, his gift of selection and fitness placed his results on a
higher artistic plane than those by whom he had been evidently inspired,
and to-day his work is always amongst the most dignified and refined in
any exhibition. Technically he resorts to no fumbled trickery, nor does
he strain any of the means he uses beyond their own inherent powers.
Before his landscapes one feels the mood of time and place charmingly
interpreted, such moods of Nature, when the trivialities of the day have
passed, or only those remain which fittingly appeal, with their silent
ponderings.
In 1869, at Dalry, Ayrshire, George Houston was born (Plate XX), and it
is as a painter of that part of Scotland that his name became most in
evidence before the Scottish art world in 1904 by a large-scaled canvas,
_An Ayrshire Landscape_, shown at the exhibition of the Glasgow Fine
Arts Institute. No little praise was bestowed upon it by artists and
public alike, resulting in its being purchased for the City’s permanent
collection. But memories recall other earlier and smaller works
creatively quite as important. To place Houston amongst the Scottish
artists is to do so individually, as his work is extremely personal,
both technically and compositionally. Late winter and early spring
landscapes attract him most, the time, too, when the earth is just
dappled with snow, and the atmosphere and undergrowth alive in all their
gentle colour-harmony. A keen lover of Nature, little escapes his
observation, and it is those qualities of his mind and outlook, so
carefully expressed in his oil paintings, that arrest admiring attention
in his water-colours of similar themes.
By age, W. Russell Flint and D. Murray Smith belong to the group of
younger Scottish painters, and otherwise, similarly, both artists have
been resident in England for a considerable time. It is only within
recent years that their work has appeared, as it were, anew in the
Scottish exhibitions. W. Russell Flint (Plate XIX) was born in Edinburgh
in 1880; originally studying in the art school there, he made his home
in London in 1900, where, after a short course at Heatherley’s Academy,
his name and work came rapidly into prominence. In 1913 he was awarded
the silver medal for his water-colours in the Salon des Artistes
Français. The following year he was elected an associate of the Royal
Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and a full member in 1917. As an
artist both figure and landscape equally reveal his versatile ability.
As an illustrator, too, he can claim no less distinctive recognition by
his charming imagery expressed in that phase of his talent in the
publications of the Riccardi Press. Thoroughly acquainted with the
medium of water-colour, he applies it with no special mannerism other
than the choice his vision dictates and the subjects of his mind most
emotionally demand.
Though less varied paths tempt the outlook of D. Murray Smith (Plate
XXII), his spacious conceptions of landscapes are uncommonly
interesting. The admirable characteristics of largeness and freedom,
which earlier prophesied a coming artist in the Scottish capital where
he was born, have altered little. As an etcher of illustrative
landscapes in those days he gained no meagre reputation, which he has
vastly enhanced in England, where he settled some twenty-four years ago.
In all his works there pervades a strong affection for flat expanses of
Nature, unhampered in the composition by the human element, save for
friendly wayside cottages or distant villages. It is, however, those
examples where even such features are the least prominent, like his
unpeopled roads, that have a most abiding charm, manifesting at times a
vision and technical qualities akin to the rare landscapes by the old
Dutch and early English masters, and to the French in their Corotesque
and lyrical love of trees. And it is, perhaps, to the lyrical aspects of
Nature that water-colour is most closely allied, and in such of her
voiceless poems most expressively lives the spirit of the medium.
[Illustration: PLATE XV.
“THE MAPLE IN AUTUMN.” BY ROBERT W. ALLAN, R.W.S., R.S.W.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVI.
“BEN MORE.” BY A. K. BROWN, R.S.A., R.S.W.
(_In the possession of J. Whitelaw Hamilton, Esq., A.R.S.A._)]
[Illustration: PLATE XVII.
“A MOORLAND.” BY JAMES CADENHEAD, A.R.S.A., R.S.W.]
[Illustration: PLATE XVIII.
“AUTUMN IN STRATH TAY.” BY D. Y. CAMERON, A.R.A., R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W.
(_In the possession of R. Skinner, Esq._)] [Illustration: PLATE XIX.
“APRIL EVENING, RYDAL WATER.” BY W. RUSSELL FLINT, R.W.S., R.S.W.
(_In the possession of Messrs. Ernest Brown & Phillips, the Leicester
Galleries._)]
[Illustration: PLATE XX.
“IONA.” BY GEORGE HOUSTON, A.R.S.A., R.S.W.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXI.
“FRENCHLAND TO QUEENSBERRY, MOFFAT DALE.” BY JAMES PATERSON, R.S.A.,
R.W.S., R.S.W.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXII.
“ON THE WAY TO THE SOUTH DOWNS.” BY D. MURRAY SMITH, A.R.W.S.]
[Illustration: PLATE XXIII.
“A BIT OF HIGH CORRIE.” BY E. A. TAYLOR.
(_In the possession of Charles Holme, Esq._)]
[Illustration: PLATE XXIV.
“SUFFOLK PASTURES.” BY E. A. WALTON, R.S.A., P. R.S.W.
(_In the possession of John Tattersall, Esq._)]
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The development of British landscape painting in water-colours" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.