more matter with less art: romantic attitudes toward landscape painting

More Matter with Less Art: Romantic Attitudes toward Landscape PaintingAuthor(s): Adele M. HolcombSource: Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 303-306Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776086 .

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More Matter with Less Art: Romantic Attitudes toward Landscape Painting

ADELE M. HOLCOMB

"... Dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer

mornings; deep furrowed cabbage-leaves at the greengro- cer's; and Thames' shore within three minutes' race": in Ruskin's Modern Painters these are among the sights of Turner's Covent Garden boyhood that durably shaped the

sensibility of the mature artist. The tawdry vitality of Turner's

surroundings in Maiden Lane, we learn, attached him ever after to "market-womanly types of humanity," to dirt and smoke, things fishy and muddy, prolific litter, red-faced sailors, to fishing boats and to shipping of all kinds-these latter the "only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky."' Ruskin's account could not of course have been furnished from the exiguous statements left by the painter. His evocation of Turner's early milieu is akin to the character-shaping environment of the Victorian novel; expanding on some few known circumstances it con- structs an ambience charged with light, movement, physical detail, and a coherent social climate. Its sheer imaginative force has guaranteed it authority. Even the occasional objec- tion that has been offered, like Dutton Cook's in Art in

England (1869),2 against tracing Turner back to Covent Gar- den in all his work, testifies to the potency of Ruskin's vision.

But, given the prominence of topographical motifs in Ro- mantic landscape, one might wonder whether artists in this

genre should not often have been affected by impressions of this kind. Could not the concern to characterize places in

landscapes by, for example, Constable, Meryon, and Cour- bet, have been deeply rooted in local ties? Painters (and

etchers) of landscape in the period have generally had rela- tively little to say on this point.

More often they have expressed admiration for fine scenery and splendid effects in much the same manner as other attentive observers, or they have praised nature in general terms. On his first Swiss trip in 1802, Turner approved the Alpine "fragments and precipices (as) very romantic and strikingly grand"; Switzerland "on the whole surpasses Wales, and Scotland, too," he found.3 John Sell Cotman's attraction to the banks of the Greta-the wood above Greta Bridge "really is a delicious Spot," he wrote in 18054-per- haps shows a more recherche taste, but it does not reveal any discernible influence of the artist's Norfolk origins. Denying, apparently, the significance of topographical elements of any kind, Caspar David Friedrich reportedly said in 1820: "The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand," despite the evidence of his work that the divine was most often manifest to him in specific features of German scenery.5 But painters seldom generalized about the bearing of locality on their art. Constable's assertion in 1821 that scenes of his boyhood on the River Stour had made him a painter is more exceptional than representative.6 Preoccupied with the active choice and

management of motifs and means, the possibility that they involuntarily registered early influences may not to many artists have seemed a compelling speculation.

They were not, in any case, encouraged to engage in it by the theorizing of critics much before the second third of the 19th century. That landscape painters were molded by visual

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encounter with a familiar environment was rather an idea gaining momentum than a firmly established principle of interpretation before 1830. Its ascendancy was undoubtedly stimulated by the kindred belief of 19th-century novelists that the sense of place is a vital dimension of consciousness. Scott's imagination moved in a framework of topographical particulars, associating in David Daiches' phrase, "the stabil-

ity and continuity of place with the perpetual movement" of historical time.7 The novels of Balzac and Dickens concretely depict location, as well as social context, in defining their characters' totality of circumstance. Locale is a constantly impinging presence in the novels of Thomas Hardy, where the conjunction of human and topological elements (usually with a symbolic significance) is fundamental to the narrative

tempo. By the end of the century, the idea of the influence of milieu on character had so solidified that, cooperating syn- chronically with personal and social factors, it could become a fatality. In the philosophy of Taine it enjoyed the status of a "law" on the analogy: "Les naturalistes le savent, on com-

prend tres bien I'animal d'apres sa coquille."8 How this belief colored ideas of the artist's Geistesbildung

is best seen in British opinion on the arts, given England's pioneering role in Romantic landscape and in critical attention to landscape art. A survey of the national literature in this field suggests that we have to do with a developing biograph- ical convention that doubles as exegetical topos. Thus, the beauties of Clifton in Gloucestershire are credited by the writer George Cumberland in 1825 with having produced Francis Danby and the rest of the Bristol school of early 19th-

century landscape painters.9 In her essay "The House of Titian" (1846), Anna Jameson finds that the great Venetian "perpetually reproduced" his native scenery of Pieve di Ca- dore, while that of Venice figures only as background in some historical pictures.10 J. L. Roget's History of the Old Water-Colour Society claims that when the shores of the Thames were "irregular and ragged, with a garniture of mud- banks, and abounding in picturesque groups of stranded barges," their scenes helped form the sensibility of Thomas Girtin, as well as that of Turner." And, in a related claim, Richard and Samuel Redgrave's Century of British Painters (1866) affirms that Turner's art was fostered by Thames scenery although, differing with Ruskin, denies that it had any benefit from the hovels and sheds of Covent Garden.'2

The Redgraves frequently reveal their belief in the potency of locale in a negative way. Thus, baffled expectations figure in their account of Samuel Prout: "Though born in a country richly wooded, and with an abundant weedage, Prout seems to have been naturally deficient in the power of representing foliage, and he rarely introduced trees into his pictures."'3 What we might think was the larger issue of how this Devon- shire-bred artist came to excel in views of Continental cities receives no comment. Prout's colleague in the Old Water- Colour Society, David Cox, also resisted interpretation along these lines. His biography by N. N. Solly (1873) discovers no support for his art in Cox's native Birmingham or environs, but settles instead on his residence between 1814 and 1827 near Hereford, on the famously picturesque Wye, as critical to his mature achievement.'4

Claims of the indebtedness of Norwich artists to their natal scene are as frequent as one would expect in accounts of this important regional school. Laurence Binyon, for example, in

an essay on John Sell Cotman relates the artist's preference for square architectural structures, which he often opposed compositionally to fluid masses of foliage, to early impressions of the great square keep of Norwich Castle.15 Less likely, one might think, was the critical treatment in such terms of Samuel Palmer's visionary landscape. Yet the History of the Old Water-Colour Society asseverates of Palmer's so- journ in Kent: "The character of his art was in a great degree formed by the influence of rural surroundings amid which he then pursued his studies.16

These representative assertions, unembarrassed by concern for documentary support, reveal the assumption that virtually any instance of landscape painting could be referred to the painter's local attachments. They seem to flout the earlier understanding that artists formed themselves on the example of other artists' work, denying the equation of 'Na- ture' with the whole of observable reality, a universal, self- evident standard of truth. Some adumbrations of this radical shift in viewpoint can be traced to the late 18th and early years of the 19th century. The earliest I have found occurs in the Gentlemen's Magazine obituary of Gainsborough (1788): "Nature was his teacher, and the woods of Suffolk his Acad- emy."'7 Elsewhere the notice derives Gainsborough's style from other artists in the traditional way, to Wynants for foreground thistles and dock leaves, to Snyders for animals, and to Ruysdael, Teniers, Watteau, and others for further hints. But the association of Gainsborough's art with Suffolk groves was premonitory in its suggestion, however rhetori- cal, that the locality affected his work.

There are also some interesting early attempts to identify local sources for the art of Salvator Rosa, who was hugely admired in England for the wildness of his bandit-haunted scenes. The painter James Barry avers in his Works (1809) that Salvator formed himself on Alpine scenery between Turin and Grenoble.'8 The fictitious "Blunderbussiana," modeled after Salvator Rosa, is supposed in William Beckford's Bio- graphical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) to have been marked by the rugged Dalmatian setting in which he was reared; his "first ideas" were shaped by the region's gloomy caverns hollowed in craggy rocks.19 And, in a full- dress biography of the artist in 1824, Lady Morgan asserts that Salvator "drew his first inspirations from the magnificent scenery of Pausilippo and Vesuvius." Often he ran away from home and "took shelter among those sites and scenes whose imagery became a part of his own intellectual existence, and were received as impressions long before they were studied as subjects."20 Lady Morgan's is one of the first circumstantial accounts of its kind and strikingly anticipates Turner's exalt- ing experience of the Yorkshire hills (also away from home) in several passages of Modern Painters.21

The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa was followed shortly by another strategic contribution, a work by the Scottish poet and essayist Allan Cunningham. His Lives of the Most Emi- nent British Painters and Sculptors (1829-33) consistently reads landscape painting as an articulation of national character and, since it became a standard reference until at least the end of the century (three editions were published by 1880 and a selection in 1886), Cunningham's opinions gained wide currency among readers interested in the fine arts. Some of his dicta we might by now anticipate. The Suffolk woods have enhanced credit for shaping the young Gainsborough, in-

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spiring his love of art and providing subjects for "pencillings" that resemble his mature work.22 Richard Parkes Bonington is a conundrum because he did not favor the environs of his

Nottingham home; the author marvels that anyone living so far inland should become a painter of spirited coastal scenes.23 So determined is Cunningham's view of the

painter's local allegiance that he attributes "freshness of look, and a rude, homely strength" in the portraiture of John Opie to the influence of his native Cornwall.24 Notable, too, is his treatment of Richard Wilson. There does not seem to be any precedent for detecting a residue of Welsh loyalty in the variant of classical landscape that Wilson practiced. Yet Cun-

ningham declares that when Wilson was persuaded in Italy to renounce portraiture for landscape, "He found himself bet- ter prepared for this new pursuit than he had imagined; he had been long insensibly storing his mind with the beauties of natural scenery, and the picturesque mountains and glens of his native Wales had been to him an academy when he was unconscious of their influence."25 This involuntary gathering of scenic data again recalls the mnemonic process that Lady Morgan ascribed to Salvator Rosa.

But beyond Cunningham's apparent derivations from the

preceding literature lies the more significant aspect of those broad social factors that favored the hegemony of his views. One precondition, surely, was Britain's phenomenal eco- nomic expansion; the growth in population from 11 to 161/2 millions between 1801 and 183126 brought to the leisured classes new arrivals ambitious for some acquaintance with the fine arts. In the interval separating Waterloo from the death of George IV in 1830, no fewer than 10 new periodicals were launched to respond in part anyway to this burgeoning demand.27 Although many of the critics pressed into service were poorly equipped or philistine in outlook, they could at least assure their readers that the principles of painting, sculpture, and architecture might be readily grasped by the plainest intellects. The opening number of the Athenaeum (1828), for example, argues that appreciation of the visual arts does not require "habits of patient observation and careful analysis." Instead, it is provided for by attentiveness to what is natural and probable in ordinary life. The attempt to de- mocratize connoisseurship paralleled the great popular groundswell that climaxed in passage of the Third Reform Bill of 1832, which was echoed as well in criticism of the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the National Gallery.

Cunningham's book thus appeared at a time when attacks on social privilege in the art world tended also to call into question the claims of cultivated taste and knowledge. In this context, the accessibility of his interpretations must have had a potent appeal. If landscape painters acquired the essential elements of their art by looking at, or remembering, familiar surroundings, their apprehensions were not different in kind from those of the average citizen. Some acknowledgement might be made of the special requirements of sculpture and history painting, but with respect to landscape everyone could understand the power of local ties as a part of common experience.

Belief in the influence of locale was at the same time a vital component of nationalist sentiment in the period. It was congenial to the sympathy with suppressed nationalities that flourished with European enthusiasm for the Greek struggle against Turkish rule. That Lady Morgan emphasized Salvator

Rosa's local affiliations in a biography portraying him as a partisan of Italian independence is hardly fortuitous, I would suggest. Cunningham's passionate Scottish nationalism in turn affected his approach as a biographer of artists. A collec- tor of the ancient ballads of his country, he praised Scottish lyrics as natural and spontaneous, in contrast to the courtly poetry of England. Scottish songs emphasize time and place, "sharp and fresh presentment of incident and scene," it is claimed in his Songs of Scotland (1825).28 Echoing the ideas of J. G. Herder and Mme. de Stael, Cunningham urges that all the works of genius of a nation should be judged in terms of national peculiarities. Adjusted to the scale of regional idio- syncrasy, this principle is applied throughout Cunningham's Lives.

The critic's baggage, too, may be estimated by the same criterion urged for works of national "genius." For social history and nationalist ideology in general cannot altogether account for this insistence on the role of locale. Other schools had their own experiences of nationalism and social upheaval, but did not dwell on the sense of place as British critics did, nor were they much concerned with it as a factor independent of social context. Evidently, it was an insular preoccupation. Its roots probably lie very deeply in national patterns of thought and feeling, in proprietary affection for the land, its breadths, heights and hollows, coasts, textures and climates, its oddities of feature. One thinks of the inher- itance of English travel literature and of that branch of it that gives exhaustive attention to the topography of the country and its associations. Or of the substantial reality invoked in Shakespeare's phrase, "A local habitation and a name," so often quoted in the early 19th century. The English landscape garden comes to mind with its adherence to Pope's maxim: "Consult the genius of the place in all." Habits of thought so long and firmly fixed that they inform a multitude of cultural expressions seem to be at issue. In making the sense of place a critical touchstone, the British Romantics appear to have brought a national legacy into full self-awareness.

It remains to ask how much they contributed to the understanding of landscape art. Of course there are objections. As indicated in the sampling of judgments presented, the pre- sumption that landscape is governed by the authority of locale could lead to forced readings or confessions of baffle- ment. Overlooking the traditions and modes of landscape painting, it fails to consider that topographical identity may have no bearing on a work in this genre. Moreover, the fact that even the most realist or experimental tendencies of landscape were realized in a realm of forms and of painterly feasibility was ignored. The prominence given locale implies the passive imprint of visual impressions on the tabula rasa of the artist's mind and their re-registration in landscape images by an apparently unmediated process. We look in vain for some distinction between what is objectively given and what the artist has made of the materials.

There is also some doubt that painters were always and with lasting effect influenced by their childhood surroundings. The directions of public taste were most often more compelling factors than purely personal attitudes, in any case, and the tendency in topographical publications largely favored new veins of subject matter after the Napoleonic wars. But artists also shared in the general attraction to variety and exoticism.

SUMMER 1977 305



Yet, with all the faultiness of its application, the concern with milieu and local attachments does amount to more than a casual literary resource of the period before art history was professionally established. It signals, however clumsily, to- wards something essential in Romantic landscape painting. Specificity of place is a function of Romantic realism, a con- comitant of the exact temporal definition provided in depic- tion of transient atmospheric effects. Insistence on it is par- ticularly a British contribution to the broad rejection of uni- versality and timelessness in favor of all that is characterful in nature and society. Travel in England outside London affords many intimations of how sensitive some Romantics were to regional qualities in landscape. A trip through the Yorkshire

countryside south of Leeds on an overcast afternoon may vividly recall the heroic and melancholy breadth of a landscape by Girtin; the low, rolling farm lands of East Anglia reveal the materials of Constable's Cornfield or of Cotman's A Ploughed Field. Of course, nature resembles art in these instances-but the reverse is also true. One recognizes cer- tain virtualities in a range of landscape that the painter has seized imaginatively and epitomized in a formal design. A mutuality exists, based not on imitation but on a synthetic vision. I

1 Modern Painters, V (first published 1860), 2nd ed., London, 1898, pp. 317- 319. 2 Art in England, London, 1869, p. 320. 3 A. J. Finberg, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R. A., 2nd ed. rev., Oxford, 1961, pp. 83-84. 4 Letter to Francis Cholmeley addressed from Greta Bridge, August [29, 1805] in Cholmeley correspondence owned by F. W. A. Fairfax-Cholmeley, Esq. and deposited in the North Yorkshire Record Office, County Hall, Northallerton, Yorkshire (Ref.: ZQG). 5 According to the writer Karl Forster, who visited Friedrich in his studio on

April 19,1820; quoted in Helmut Borsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, New York, 1974, p. 114. 6 Letter to John Fisher of October 23, 1821 in C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R.A. London, 1951, p. 86. 7 "Scott and Scotland" in Scott Bicentenary Essays, Alan Bell, ed., Edin- burgh & London, 1973, p. 44. 8 Voyage en Italie (excerpts from) in Philosophie de I'art, etc., Paris, 1964, p. 105. 9 In a letter to his son George Cumberland, Jr., quoted by Eric Adams, Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Landscape, New Haven & London, 1973, p. 29. 10 In Memoirs and Essays illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals, London, 1846, p. 44. 11 A History of the Old Water-Colour Society, I, London and New York, 1891, p. 86. 12 A Century of British Painters, new ed., London, 1947, p. 251. 13 Op. cit., p. 435. 14 Memoir of the Life of David Cox, London, 1873, p. 50. 15 "The Life and Work of John Sell Cotman," The Studio, Summer, 1903, p. jsc viii. 16 II, p. 274. 17 LVIII (Sept., 1788), p. 473. 18 I, London, 1809, p. 59. 19 R. J. Gemmett, ed., Cranberry, N. J., 1969, p. 84. 20 The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, I, London, 1824, p. 44. 21 1, p. 133; IV, pp. 259, 317, 327; V, p. 323. 22 The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors, I, London, 1829-33, p. 331. 23 III, p. 299. 24 I, p. 221. 25 I, pp. 197-198. 26 According to census figures. 27 For a survey of 19th-century art periodicals in England, which is however brief for the early decades, see Michael Collins, "English Art Magazines before 1901," Connoisseur, March, 1976, pp. 198-205. 28 The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, I, London, 1825, pp. 6 and 11.

Adele M. Holcomb teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She has recently written on John Sell Cotman for British Museum Publications and is also the co-editor of the anthology Women Scholars in Art.

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more matter with less art: romantic attitudes toward landscape painting

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