Every stone or shady tree

In the British Museum's print room you can currently see Raphael to Cozens: Drawings from the Richard Payne Knight bequest. Here are three of the landscapes and a few notes on each one.

Guercino, Landscape with Angelica and Medoro, c. 1621

I have only mentioned Guercino (1591-1666) once before on this blog and never talked about one of his pictures. The exhibition caption notes that 'the figures of the two lovers and Cupid in the drawing, inspired by characters in Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso (first published in 1516), are almost lost in Guercino's exuberant visual description of the landscape.' It was the names of these lovers carved in 'sundry places' that drove Orlando furioso - he was in love with Angelica. Here she is pointing at a tree, but the names also appear on a rock in front of them, because the lovers had been wandering around searching out 'every stone or shady tree,/ To grave their names with bodkin, knife or pin.' (This is from the first English translation by Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's 'saucy Godson' and inventor of the flush toilet.)

Claude Lorrain, The River Tiber see from the Monte Mario, c. 1640

What's really striking about this one is Claude's use of brown ink wash - other Claude drawings in the exhibition are more precise descriptions of trees or buildings which he could use later in his paintings. However, the BM website explains that 'the development of this brush technique can be followed within the early sketchbook and in pen-and-wash studies of the 1640s.' They also note that 'brush drawings of this kind attracted the ire of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, who described them disparagingly in Modern Painters as "blottesque landscape"'.

 

John Robert Cozens, Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro, c. 1777-78

Here, in the distance, is Mount Etna, which has recently been in the news, after erupting on June 2nd. Cozens accompanied Payne Knight on his second journey to Italy but didn't go as far as Sicily. This watercolour was therefore based on a study made by Charles Gore, transforming a topographical sketch into a study in the sublime. 'The figures are dwarfed by the trees and rocks and the bonfire, burning brilliantly against the moonlit sky. The hill and mountain brood menacingly in the background and the colours are subdued and subtly varied in tone. The poetic mood of the drawing is dark and sombre as a result.'

The Reichenbach Falls

J. M. W. Turner, The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of Hasle, Switzerland, 1804

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Turner painted the Reichenbach Falls before they became famous as the setting for Sherlock Holmes' apparent death at the hands of Professor Moriarty.  But to what extent were they 'famous' already, before Conan Doyle visited the falls in 1893, or even before Turner arrived in 1802?  The Tate has a sketch by Turner made earlier, in the mid 1790s, after a painting by John Robert Cozens.  The Tour through Switzerland made in 1776 by connoisseur Richard Payne Knight, accompanied by Cozens, influenced later itineraries and it was around this time that the Reichenbach Falls became a destination for early Alpine tourists.  In Leslie Stephen's book on the Alps, The Playground of Europe, he refers to the way geographical features become cultural destinations.  Looking back to geologist Gottlieb Sigmund Gruner's Die Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes (1760) he notes that the Reichenbach Falls had already become an 'object of interest', separated off from the surrounding landscape, whereas the Rigi (a mountain now particularly associated with Turner) was still a mere 'phenomenon of nature'.

We visited the Reichenbach Falls on a misty day last month and, as you can see from my photographs, it is still an impressive landmark.  Here is Conan Doyle's description in 'The Final Problem'.

It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.

The Reichenbach Falls can easily be reached from the village of Meiringen (although to keep Dr Watson away from the action, Conan Doyle made the distance further).  There in the village, next to the Sherlock Holmes museum, Leslie Stephen is commemorated in a dramatic statue.  He looks full of energy, very different from how I usually think of him, as Virginia Woolf's bearded Victorian father, the model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.  Up at the falls there is a plaque, put up in 1991, commemorating the centenary of Holmes's encounter with Moriarty.  It refers to what Conan Doyle later decided had really happened on that narrow path: 'At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.'  Thus fiction changes how we experience a landscape.  The lure of particular places is often down to their association with stories and myths, but here we can trace the process over the course of just a few years - from the Reichenbach Falls' preexisting fame, which brought Conan Doyle here in the first place, to their dramatic role in an event that shocked the reading public, and then, after Holmes was brought back from the dead, their subsequent fascination as a site of speculation, which shows no signs of dying away.  

The Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo

When art historians read changes in style as reflecting broader political changes it is often possible to argue from both ‘sides’. For example, Ann Bermingham in her essay ‘English Landscape Drawing around 1795’ argues that the impact of the French Revolution was seen in a rejection of earlier forms of landscape composition, based on the idealised classical landscapes painted in seventeenth century Italy, in favour of more naturalistic drawings where the forms of nature took on a more individual character. From a liberal perspective, this would be consistent with an appreciation of the real qualities of the English countryside, rather than the kinds of views sought on the Grand Tour. However, from a conservative point of view, the change in landscape painting could equally be seen as a rejection of the systematic abstractions of theory and the open intellectual spaces of the prospect view, in favour of local scenes demonstrating the timeless qualities of the native landscape.

Thomas Hearn, A Brownian Landscape Garden and A Picturesque Landscape Garden, 

illustrations for Richard Payne Knight's 'Landscape'

These political differences reflect contemporary changes in picturesque theory. The conservative position was essentially that taken by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight in their criticisms of the gardens of Capability Brown and the picturesque theories of William Gilpin. Both Brown and Gilpin had imposed the harmonious compositions of painters like Claude onto the real landscape. Thomas Hearne provided the illustrative etchings of Brownian and Picturesque gardens for Knight’s didactic poem 'The Landscape' (1795) - see above.  Ann Bermingham sees the new style embodied in Hearne’s art. She contrasts Hearn’s detailed view of Oak Trees (c. 1786) with a slightly earlier view of The Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo (c 1783-5) by John Robert Cozens. So Cozens’ older painting could be either a comforting conservative souvenir of an idealised Italy or a liberal artistic expression of the eighteenth century’s expanding horizons. Take your pick.

John Robert Cozens, The Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo, c. 1783-5

Thomas Hearne, Oak Trees, c. 1786