Landscapes, sublime and picturesque

I took advantage of the gap in Six Nations rugby to pay a visit to the Royal Academy at the weekend.   I wasn’t going to the latest blockbuster Manet show however (I’ll catch up with that later) but catching a rather less vigorously touted exhibition before it closed.   This was entitled “Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and the Making of Landscape”.  

Like an awful lot of exhibition titles, this was a bit of a misnomer- some might say a bit of a cheat.   While there were some very striking works by the three big names on display, they only formed a small part of the show.  The “making of landscape” side of things also needed a bit of glossing.  Landscape art in one form or another was not exactly a novelty in Britain the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries- there had for instance for years been a lively, if lowish status trade, in producing more or less accurate depictions of country houses and estates for sale to their owners.   “Making” in this context meant a willingness to accord depictions or more or less idealised British landscapes the respect given to depictions of more or less fantastical Italian landscapes by the stars of the 17^th century artistic firmament as collected in Britain.  Even more relevant, however, was “making” in the simple physical sense of creation- not so much the creation of paintings, however, but the processes of engraving and reproducing those paintings for a much wider audience than would ever have seen the originals.  Indeed the bulk of the exhibition was made up of engravings and mezzotints rather than original oils (supplemented by a few watercolours- another relatively cheap and “popular” medium of the day).  

Some visitors may have been disappointed by this focus.   I found it fascinating- indeed I’d have liked rather more on the ways in which the “big name” artists and their less well remembered contemporaries interacted with the wider market for art and a bit less on “the Sublime” and “the Picturesque”. While these concepts clearly did inform art commentary in the late 18^th century and artists sought to conform to expectations in order to get the right sort of reviews, I began to get lost in the distinctions which the exhibition’s display material and little quasi-catalogue sought to make between different works and I’ve a suspicion that the artists themselves were apt to play games with the concepts.

After a bit of a false start of works by contemporary artists drawing (very loosely indeed in some cases) on the landscape tradition, the exhibition proper started with engravings of works by the stars I referred to above- Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and “Poussin” (in fact 18^th century collectors had a lot of trouble distinguishing between the great Nicolas of that ilk and his prolific if somewhat less talented brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet and were apt to collapse their works together).   It’s well worth being reminded just how difficult it was even for professional artists to experience admired art works first hand.   There was no publicly accessible art gallery in Britain before Dulwich opened its doors in 1812.   Most of the works imported from Italy by returning Grand Tourists disappeared into private collections which might be hung in country houses spread out from Galway to Kent and from Aberdeenshire to Cornwall.   Even an artist with good connections to open doors for him would at best see a very limited selection of pieces, probably those in London and the Home Counties.   Even artists, therefore, relied heavily on engravings to get a sense for what this much-admired art looked like.  

Landscape figured prominently in this art- though in a rather specific way.   The landscape in question was a very idealised version on the countryside round Rome-with higher hills, more rugged rocks, larger and clearer lakes and cooler and lusher woods than the reality (and no sign of the malaria-infested marshes which filled the region until Mussolini’s day).   It was rarely the nominal subject of the painting.  That was usually drawn from classical mythology or, more rarely, from the Bible, though you sometimes needed a magnifying glass to see the figures involved in the action.   Its very artifice contributed to the Sublime aspect of such works as understood by contemporaries- a good going thunderstorm in the background or other weather-related light effects helped as well.   I suspect that the fact most critics would also experience a lot of art in engraving form may have shaped their appreciation of it- the darks and lights and shadings on a basically black and white colour range would tend to enhance the dramatic effects.

Given the cultural prestige of this art, it’s not surprising that British artists wanted to break into the market.   The first to do so wasn’t one of the show’s headline names but the much less heralded Welshman Richard Wilson (one of the great might have beens of British art- a man of great talent but very quarrelsome and far too fond of the bottle).   Jones was Roman trained and his breakthrough work (nominally based on the myth of Niobe) still refers to that tradition.  This was picked up for engraving by  the publisher John Boydell, who had spotted the market potential and was a man on a mission to compete with the high quality French imports which dominated the British market; in this venture he was fortunate to have the services of a top class engraver in the shape of William Woollett.   Wilson moved on from idealised depictions of Italian scenery with events from classical mythology as the nominal subject to idealised depictions of British (indeed often specifically Welsh) scenery with the odd reference to ancient Cambrian mythology- though this historico-mythological alibi became less and less important and eventually vanished.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Wilson was far from the only British artist feeding the market for engravings of domestic landscapes.   It’s worth being reminded that what is conventionally described as a Romantic taste for domestic tourism to more or less remote (preferably mountainous) parts of Britain considerably predates the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which are supposed to have stimulated it by making Continental Europe inaccessible.   I’d have liked to know a lot more about how the domestic market worked.  The assumption is that these prints served a wider (though still pretty well heeled) market than would have purchased original oils but it would have been nice to have a bit more detail on who was buying (subscription lists clearly still exist)?  How far was consumer demand shaping what artists like Wilson or local figures like Thomas Smith of Derby (who managed to make the Peak District look like the High Alps) created?  Or were the publishers setting the agenda and moulding demand to conform to their own preoccupations?   Boydell was clearly articulating a distinctly patriotic standpoint in his choice of works to engrave, and not just in the field of landscapes (he commissioned a major set of worked based on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, for instance).

The three big names headlining the show responded to this market demand in different ways.  Gainsborough enjoyed doing landscapes as a relief from the treadmill of the bread and butter portrait work but did his own engravings almost on a hobbyist basis and with limited commercial sales.  His approach to landscape art tended towards “the Picturesque” rather than “the Sublime”- an artistic lineage going back to 17^th century Dutch work which valued the informal and irregular aspects of the countryside and largely eschewed overt dramatic gestures (his countryside is peopled by gypsies rather than heroes of classical mythology).   How far it was any more “accurate” and less idealising is another question…..  Turner (perhaps predictably) revelled in the commercial side of things, launching a subscription series of landscape engravings produced by a team of engravers bulled and badgered into meeting his quality control requirements.  Equally predictably he never quite delivered all the engravings promised in the series.  In some ways Turner emerges as rather conservative and “academic” in his practice, working up the final versions for engraving in the studio well after the original sketches had been made- and with a distinct air of the Sublime in the exaggerations he incorporated (hills are always that bit higher than the Ordinance Survey figures say they are, rivers that bit wider- as with the image of Norham Castle at the top of this piece).   Constable by contrast found one collaborator, Charles Lucas, who worked closely with him on making the engravings of the grand “six footer” paintings which made his name.  Constable’s oils manage to combine the grandeur of the Sublime with the apparently commonplace of the Picturesque, getting a full measure of spectacle and drama out of the flat and relatively featureless landscape of East Anglia (as in the picture of Flatford Lock below).   A very English fascination with the weather helped; the exhibition contained a couple of the innovative oil sketches of cloud formations which he made out of doors as an aide memoire when  it came to creating drama in the big skies over his landscapes.   Lucas in turn did a brilliant job of translating Constable’s dynamic view of every day life into the black and white shadings of engraving- at times the engravings are even more dramatic than the oils they popularise.  

The exhibition also contains a section on the work of lesser lights like the wonderfully named Michael Angelo Rooker (no doubt over the trade his parents expected him to follow…) and the development of sketching and water colour work as arts in their own right rather than purely preparatory stages for producing masterpieces in the studio- Constable’s clouds also fit into this model.   Here too, however, the wider social context remains (perhaps appropriately) a bit sketchy.  Clearly there was money and fame to be gained from fine art engraving- an important point in a world where traditional approaches to artistic patronage were shifting and artists had a very much higher view of their own social standing than would have been the case a generation or two earlier.  Being “His lordship’s most humble and obedient servant” was going out of fashion as top range artists presented themselves as gentlemen and even began to become part of the social elite themselves (knighthoods for Presidents of the Royal Academy like Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West pointing the way).   Ironically (or perhaps revealingly) the social recognition didn’t extend to the engravers and water colourists, who struggled to gain election as RA members in their own right and were very much second class citizens in the republic of arts.   The exhibition scarcely begins to examine the complex dynamics of that situation, where a “fine” artist’s fame outside the specialist art world, not to mention his revenues, were largely dependent on the work done by others who remained restricted to artisan status.  The discrimination has still not quite disappeared; I can’t imagine the RA getting sponsorship to stage an exhibition which majored on names like Woollett or Lucas any time soon.