Week 4

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7 TOPOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL

 

It became the fashion for the sons of the British aristocracy to complete their education by travelling on the continent. The tourists bought art – fragments of antiquity as well as Renaissance paintings – and also sought works to remind them of their travels, particularly landscapes. For the wealthy, Claude was favoured, but many others bought works from contemporary artists. Some of these were Italian, but works were also available from a number of resident British painters (who, like the wealthy tourists, were completing their education, though in this case as artists).

 

The appreciation of landscape at first focused on the scenery of Europe, but gradually shifted to encompass the British Isles. The grander scenes of the Lake District, the Scottish lochs and the Welsh mountains were particularly fashionable, but the gentler English countryside was also admired. When it was dangerous to venture abroad during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, English travellers increasingly visited sites in their own country, including the estates of wealthy landowners. This less extravagant tourism was also possible for upper middle class people who provided a new source of patronage for landscape artists. Their interests may account for a shift from ideal landscapes to a more naturalistic approach. Theorists of this period were interested in the aesthetics of landscape: attempting to explain viewers’ responses to landscape led to categorisations of the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque.

 

7 READINGS

 

A publication that offers a series of essays on the Grand Tour is

Wilton, Andrew and Bignamin, Ilaria (eds.) Grand Tour: the lure of Italy in the eighteenth century. London: Tate Gallery, 1996.

The standard, even though somewhat outdated text on 18^th-century taste is still

Hipple, Walter. The beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957.

A more recent exploration is

Andrews, Malcolm. The search for the picturesque: landscape, aesthetics and tourism in Britain 1760-1800. Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1989.

A general text that is very useful as an introduction to British landscape painting is

Rosenthal, Michael. British Landscape Painting. Oxford: Phaidon, 1982.

 

Slide List Lecture 7: TOPOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL

 

PHILIPPE DE LOUTHERBOURG (1740-1812)

1 Landscape with Overturned Wagon in a Storm. 1809. Mead Art Mus, Amherst.

2 Travellers Attacked by Bandits. 1781. Tate Gall, London.

3 An Avalanche in the Alps. 1803. Tate Gall, London.

JOHAN ZOFFANY (1725-1810)

4 Tribuna of the Uffizi. 1772-78. Royal Coll.

5 Charles Townley in his Gallery. 1782. Burnley Art Gallery.

CLAUDE

6 Narcissus and Echo. 1644. Nat Gall, London.

7 View of Tivoli and Sunset. 1642-44. Fine Arts Mus, San Francisco.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI (1720-78)

8 The Forum. Engraving from Views of Rome 1745-78.

9 The Basilica of Maxentius. Engraving from Views of Rome 1745-78.

10 St Peter’s, exterior and interior. Engraving from Views of Rome 1745-78.

CANALETTO (1697-1768)

11 Piazza and Piazzetta, Venice. Nat. Gall, Washington.

12 Canaletto The Grand Canal, looking South West. 1738. Nat Gall, London.

 

JOHN ‘WARWICK’ SMITH (1749-1831)

13 The Roman Forum. 1780. British Museum.

14 Villa of Maecenas, Tivoli. 1776-81. Victoria & Albert Mus.

FRANCIS TOWNE (1739/40-1816)

15 Tivoli from the Cascades. 1781. British Museum.

16 Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli. 1781. British Museum.

17 Source of the Arveiron, Mount Blanc. 1781. Victoria & Albert Mus, London.

JOHN ROBERT COZENS (1752-1797)

18 View of the Island of Elba.  1780. Victoria & Albert Mus, London.

19 Interior of the Colosseum, Rome. 1778. City Art Gall, Leeds.

20 The Two Great Temples at Paestum. 1782. Oldham Art Gall.

JAMES STUART AND NICHOLAS REVETT

            21 The Parthenon. Engravings from The Antiquities of Athens, 1789.

ALEXANDER COZENS (1717-1786)

22 The Cloud 1775-85. Priv Coll.

J R COUZENS

23 Cetara on the Gulf of Salerno. Nat. Gall, Washington 

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY (1734-1797)

24 A cavern; evening 1774. Smith College Coll.

25 Catania and Mount Elba. 1780s. Priv coll

26 Fireworks at the Castel S Angelo. 1774-5. Birmingham.

27 Eruption of Vesuvius. 1774-76. Univ. College of Wales.

GEORGE LAMBERT (1700-1765)

28 Classical Landscape. 1745. Tate Gall, London.

29 Box Hill with Dorking in the Distance. Yale Centre of British Art.

CANALETTO

30 London seen through Arch of Westminster Bridge. Duke of Northumberland.

31 Eton College. 1754. Nat. Gall, London.

THOMAS GIRTIN  (1755-1802)

32 Jedburgh Abbey from the south-east. 1800. Priv. coll.

33 Kirkstall Abbey; evening. 1800-01. Victorian & Albert Mus, London.

34 The White House, Chelsea.1800. Tate Gall, London

WRIGHT

35 Dovedale. 1780s. Derby Museum.

36 Landscape with a Rainbow.  1795. Derby Art Gall.

37 Matlock Tor. 1780s. Fitzwilliam Mus.

38 Matlock Tor by Moonlight. 1780s. Yale Center for British Art.

39 Cottage on Fire.  1790. Paul Mellon coll.

40 Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night. 1782-3. Private coll.

JOHN SELL COTMAN (1782-1842)

40 Brecknock. 1801. Priv coll.

41 Bedlam Furnace near Irongate. 1802-03. Priv coll.

42 Chirk Aqueduct. 1806-7 Victoria & Albert Mus, London.

43 Ploughed Field. 1808. Leeds City Art Gall.

8 RICHARD WILSON (1714-1782)

 

A key artist associated with the Grand Tour was Richard Wilson, who was one of the first English artists to make a career as a landscape painter. He started out chiefly as a portraitist in England, then spent five or six years in Italy in the 1750s. His patrons there were aristocratic English gentlemen on the Grand Tour, who appreciated his ideal landscapes in the tradition of Claude. Back in England, Wilson continued to produce works in the same style, often still painting Italian scenes, and sometimes transforming local landscapes. References to historical paintings and to themes from antiquity appealed to his educated upper class patrons. Solkins has suggested that his works were manifestations of the conservative beliefs of the land-owning class who were resisting the shift of power to an urban middle class. In later life, Wilson was less successful, and the decline in the popularity of his works might be attributed to social changes as well as changes in taste.

 

8 READINGS

 

There was a public outcry at Solkin’s revisionist reading of Wilson’s paintings at the Tate Gallery exhibition, which upset comfortable ideas of landscape as an ‘innocuous’ and ‘pleasant’ subject in art. Many members of the public felt threatened by the idea that art could be used to serve a contemporary political agenda. They were also disturbed because they understood Solkin to mean that Wilson had had a deliberate political intention in his painting, although Solkin was rather saying that Wilson’s art can be read in a socio-political way. His catalogue is a key text for political readings of landscape, and hence of this course.

 

Solkin, David. Richard Wilson. The landscape of reaction. London: Tate Gallery, 1992.

Solkin, David. ‘The battle of the Ciceros: Richard Wilson and the politics of landscape in the age of John Wilkes’ in Pugh, Simon (ed.) Reading landscape. Country - city - capital. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990, 41-65.

Slide List Lecture 8: RICHARD WILSON (1713/14-1782)

 

1                    Self Portrait. Nat. Portrait Gall, London.

2                    Francesco Zuccarelli. 1751. Tate Gall, London

3                    The Wilderness of St James’s Park. 1740s. Yale Center for British Art.

4                    The Ruined Arch at Kew Gardens. 1762. Ford coll.

5                    View on the Thames: Westminster Bridge. 1745. Art Mus, Philadelphia.

6                    Valley of the Mawddach with Cader Idris beyond. 1740s. Art Mus,

           Cleveland.

7                    Extensive Landscape with Park and Cottages. 1744-45. Priv. Coll.

8                    Via Aemilia with the Temple of the Sibyl and the broken bridge at Narni. c 1754. Priv. Coll.

9                    View of Rome with the Ponte Molle. 1754. Wales.

10                    cf Claude View of Tivoli at Sunset. 1642.

11        Destruction of Niobe’s Children. 1760. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

12                    cf Claude St George and the Dragon. 1646. Wadsworth Athenaeum.

13                    cf engraving of antique Niobe

14        Solitude. 1762.  Art Gall. Swansea.

15        The White Monk. 1760-62. Smith Coll. Mus, US.

16        Cicero and his two friends, Atticus and Quintus, at his Villa at Arpinum. 1769-70. Art Gall. of S Australia, Adelaide.

16        Croome Court. 1758-59. Priv. Coll.

17        Wilton House from the South East. 1758-60. Priv. Coll.

19        View of the Thames near Twickenham. 1762. Marble Hill House Coll.

20        Houghton Conquest House, Bedfordshire. 1765-70. Bedford Estate.

21        River Dee: Holt Bridge. 1762. Nat. Gall, London.

22        Hounslow Heath. 1765. Tate Gall, London.

23        Caernarvon Castle. 1744-45. Priv. Coll

24        Caernarvon Castle. 1765-66. Priv. Coll.

25        Llyn Peris and Dolbadern Castle. 1762-64. Art Gall. of Victoria, Melbourne.

26        Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris. 1765-67. Tate Gall, London.

27        Lake of Llyn Nantlle with Mount Snowdon. 1765-67. Castle Mus, Nottingham.