Watermeadows at Salisbury

John Constable,  Landscape with goatherd and goats, 1823

Source for all images: Wikimedia Commons

The V&A's Constable: The Making of Master exhibition provides a fascinating survey of the way Constable was influenced by other artists throughout his career.  He admired the early Gainsborough and it is easy to see why: the Landscape with Pool (1745-6) which Constable would have seen in Ipswich is absolutely exquisite.  Rubens was another stimulus: Constable's Moonlit Landscape with Hadleigh Castle uses effects he took from Rubens' Landscape by Moonlight.  I was fascinated by another Rubens in the show, Summer, with its sunlit plain and turquoise distances (Mrs Plinius dismissed it as "garish").  Also on display are direct copies of seventeenth century masters - the 'facsimile' of a Claude painting (above), and the version (below) of a Ruisdael winter scene owned by Sir Robert Peel, who insisted that Constable include a small dog to distinguish it from the original (I wonder which version is worth more now?)  This added dog inevitably reminded me of the cruise missiles inserted by Peter Kennard into his 1980 version of Constable's The Haywain, a work now owned by the Tate.

John Constable, A winter landscape with figures on a path,

a footbridge and windmills beyond, 1832

  Inscribed on the stretcher 'Copied from the Original Picture by Ruisdael in the possession of Sir Robt Peel Bt by me John Constable RA at Hampstead Sep. 1832 P.S. color (...) Dog added (...) only (...) Size of the Original (...) and Showed this pictures to Dear John Dunthrone Octr 30 1832 (...) this was the last time I (...)' and further inscribed 'Poor J Dunthorne died on Friday (all Saints) the 2d of November. 1832-at 4 o clock in the afternoon Aged 34 years.'

Constable was also interested in the methods and advice of earlier artists.  The exhibition juxtaposes Twenty Studies of Skies after Alexander Cozens (1823) with a copy of Cozens' own examples.  Constable drew these at Coleorton Hall, home of the great collector Sir George Beaumont, where (as I read on the NGA site) Constable 'also studied Cozens’s list of twenty-seven types of ‘Circumstance’ in nature, consisting of accidents (wind, rain, storm etc.), seasons (spring, autumn etc.) and characters (time of day such as ‘rising-sun’, ‘setting-sun’, and ‘close of day’'.  There is something both seductive and reductive about the idea that landscape can be classified in this way, like the tags used to label internet images.  Constable also took heed of Leonardo's advice on a means of achieving accurate perspective whilst out sketching directly from nature, a method demonstrated in this exhibition with a drawing for Watermeadows at Salisbury.

'Take a glass as large as your paper, fasten it well between your eye and the object you mean to draw, and fixing your head in a frame (in such a manner as not to be able to move it) at the distance of two feet from the glass; shut one eye, and draw with a pencil accurately upon the glass all that you see through it. After that, trace upon paper what you have drawn on the glass, which tracing you may paint at pleasure, observing the aerial perspective.' - Leonardo da Vinci - A Treatise on Painting

John Constable, Watermeadows at Salisbury, 1820 or 1829

The most interesting room in this excellent exhibition is the least colourful, devoted to Constable's collection of prints.  As the curators explain, over his career Constable amassed '59 oil paintings by ‘Old and Modern Masters’ and over 5000 prints, 250 drawings, 37 books of prints and 39 framed prints and drawings.'  This enthusiasm reminds me of Van Gogh, whose letters vividly convey his pleasure in acquiring prints (and also photographic reproductions, an option not yet available to Constable).  The small selection of Constable's collection displayed at the V&A amounts to a history of Western landscape art in its diverse forms: Dürer, Titian, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Rosa, Waterloo.  It was only a few years ago that I too would need to have owned a reproduction of one of these images to study it here in the comfort of my home.  Now they are available to me instantly wherever my phone can get a signal.

Google Image Search: Rembrandt's The Three Trees (1643),

an etching owned by Constable.

Postscript

Earlier this week, at the LRB bookshop event mentioned in my last post, I met Chris from pastoral punk duo Way Through, who told me that they had been in Constable Country this summer for a Field Broadcast project called Scene on a Navigable River.  As part of this they reworked the track 'Dedham Vale' which appeared on their 2013 album Clapper Is Still.  Field Broadcast is 'a live digital broadcasting platform led by artists Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. After downloading a special Field Broadcast app, the software waits quietly until the artist’s work is ready for transmission, when a live video stream opens unannounced on the recipient’s computer, tablet or mobile phone desktop.'  I am now imagining what would have happened if Way Through's dissonant music had suddenly activated while I was in an important meeting - I suppose this element of surprise is a way of countering the sheer availability of art online.  Two hundred years ago there was only Constable, leaving his room full of prints to walk out into the landscape his paintings were in the process of 'creating' for us.  He could reproduce an old painting but in working from nature he held up a small screen of glass the size of a modern tablet device and tried to trace what he could see.  'When I sit down to make a sketch from nature,' he wrote, 'the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.' 

John Constable, Dedham Vale, 1802 

Strange ridges and shadowy craters

In 1973 Gerhard Richter made a series of paintings based on close-up photographs of oil paintings.  According to Mark Godfrey in 'Damaged Landscapes' (an essay I've referred to before) Richter 'chose images where the swirls of paint seemed to recede from the plane of the painting.  These Details therefore appear like fictitious landscapes with strange ridges and shadowy craters.'  Leonardo da Vinci famously suggested in his Notebooks that 'when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautified with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement.'  In an earlier post I wondered whether Thomas Jones' A Wall in Naples could be considered a landscape painting, but perhaps I wasn't looking closely enough.  As you can see from the detail below (another sketch made from the roof terrace above the rooms he rented in Naples), the crumbling masonry painted by Jones starts to assume the semblance of a landscape.  But Richter's Details provoke the thought that landscapes might be discerned at some level of magnification in the folds of a velvet dress, the shadow beneath a bowl of fruit or an angel's wing. And I can almost imagine a kind of fractal landscape painting that would depict a view simultaneously at the level of the canvas, the brush stroke and the pigment (which would then need to be exhibited outside, in front of the landscape itself).

Thomas Jones, Rooftops in Naples (detail), 1782

Thomas Girtin, The White House at Chelsea (raking light detail), 1800

The terrain of the paper underneath Thomas Girtin's The White House at Chelsea becomes visible at close range, in raking light (see Peter Bower's essay 'Tone, Texture and Strength: Girtin's Use of Paper' in the Tate's 2002 Girtin retrospective catalogue).  Curators often show us explanatory photographs that resemble geological sections through the paint layers of old masterpieces.  Microscopic images of pigment return us to the basic stuff of landscape - ochre, sienna, umber. Of course this 'thingly substructure', as Heidegger called it in 'The Origin of the Work of Art', should not be confused with the the actuality of the art work.  The quality of the paper in Girtin's painting need not especially interest us (although it is less easy to argue that appreciation of an actual landscape requires no interest in its natural history, an issue I've discussed here before).  Nevertheless, the scrutiny of both detail and overall effect has always been one of the pleasures of landscape art.  In the paintings of Girtin's friend, Turner, the image always seems to be both abstract and naturalistic, however you crop it.  His View of the Arsenal (below) is a vivid reminder of how artists release colour from pigment, so that it comes, in Heidegger's phrase, to shine forth. It is through this process that an art work 'lets the earth be the earth.'
 

J. M. W. Turner, View of the Arsenal (detail), c1840

Vine and blue Appenine, convents and cypresses

Fra Angelico, The Deposition from the Cross, 1432

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Following on from my last post on Fra Angelico I'd like to focus here on his depiction of the Tuscan landscape in work of the 1430s.  In a 1979 essay Christopher Lloyd described the city representing Jerusalem in The Deposition from the Cross as 'exquisitely rendered with the precision of a miniaturist' and likened the countryside to Ruskin's description in a letter of 1845: 'one vista of vine and blue Appenine, convents and cypresses.'  In his book The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy, A. Richard Turner writes that these landscapes look as if they had been 'carved by a knife from porous rock, and then smoothly rounded until the pores disappear.  The buildings are cut from soft wood, joined with the simplest of planes, and then painted in a naive and happy juxtaposition of pastels and darks.  The lucid simplicity of this world appeals to the sensibility of our own century.  The landscape is unreal, but also supra-real.  A flood of brilliant light moves across the land, reflected with Mediterranean intensity from stuccoed walls, and intermittently absorbed into deep, cool shadows.  Piero della Francesca's luminous landscapes done thirty years later are but the subtle culmination of Fra Angelico's essays in light.'

Another painting from this time also shows the 'Corotesque purity of tone' that Kenneth Clark noticed in Fra Angelico's backgrounds, and has a special place in the history of landscape.  According to Christopher Lloyd, 'the aged Elisabeth surmounting the steep hill from which one can view the full panoply of the southern Tuscan landscape in The Visitation, a predella panel from The Annunciation at Cortona, is an unforgettable image, especially if one has climbed the hill to Cortona, a town which Henry James described as being "nearer to the sky than to the railway station, in order to see the altarpiece."'  David White (who added notes on the paintings to Lloyd's essay for the 1992 Phaidon's Colour Library book on Fra Angelico) explains that the view behind the woman climbing the hill is 'the first identifiable landscape in Italian art.  In the middle distance a lake, which no longer exists, spreads out in the Chiana Valley; beyond rises the town of Castigliona Fiorentino, and further distant the tower of Monterchi.'  This lake has now been drained but it can be seen in the map of the area made by Leonardo da Vinci.

Fra Angelico, The Visitation, c.1432

Panel from the predella for The Annunciation

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Landscape with the Penitent St Jerome

Leonardo da Vinci, Landscape, 1473

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The British Museum's 'Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings' exhibition includes three landscapes.  The first is Leonardo's famous drawing of the Arno valley dated August 5th 1473, which I mentioned in an earlier post on the link between panoramic landscape drawing to topographical maps.  We do not know if this sketch was drawn in situ, but as A. Richard Turner writes in The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy, 'these quick lines have all the quality of a spontaneous reaction to a living model.'  The next artist discussed in Turner's book is Piero di Cosimo, whose highly artificial and literary paintings he contrasts with Leonardo's.  Piero's main contribution to landscape art came in panels like Forest Fire, Hunt and Return from the Hunt but the British Museum exhibition has one of his drawings: Landscape with the Penitent St Jerome (c1490-1500).  The curators say of this that 'the intricacy of the landscape compels the viewer to unravel it slowly, a visual equivalent to the pilgrim's slow and difficult ascent to the church in the background.'

The third landscape drawing on show at the BM is a simple pen and brown ink study of travellers journeying to a village, made c1495-1508: one of the fifty or so landscape drawings that survive by Fra Bartolommeo.  He doesn't feature in Turner's book, possibly because Fra Bartolommeo's importance for landscape history wasn't fully realised until after the rediscovery of forty-one landscape sketches in 1957.  Some of the views drawn by the artist have now been identified with specific Dominican buildings, but the Christies site, describing a sketch the artist made of a tree (which sold for $996,000), suggests that 'trees rather than buildings are central to the structure of Fra Bartolommeo's landscapes.  By focusing on trees, a new analysis of these compositions is possible. There are no mountains, only gentle hills and small rocky outcrops. In most compositions elongated trees reach to the sky and shrink the buildings into insignificance as they appear to be engulfed by the undergrowth. Either sketched lightly in swirling calligraphy, or carefully outlined, the trees punctuate the scene. As in the Tuscan woods at La Verna where Saint Francis experienced his vision, Fra Bartolommeo's trees are often seen growing in between rocks. Trees, for Fra Bartolommeo, are thus the essence of landscape.'

Deluge

Leonardo da Vinci, Deluge over a City, 1517-18

The V&A exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design brought together some of the most inspiring pages from his notebooks, and actually animated some of them. It included one of Leonardo's Deluge drawings from the Royal Collection, described thus: 'Spiral cataracts of air, spray and dust wrench water and even rocks into the air, while a tree (which gives scale to the cataclysm) bends to breaking point as the storm approaches.' The drawing is set in the context of his scientific studies of motion, flow and natural forces. It is so much about the properties of the storm that it feels perverse to try to make sense of the Deluge as a landscape, but the power of the wind and water seem particularly real if you imagine them transforming the view of an actual place.

 Leonardo da Vinci, Deluge, 1519

It made me think about where artists or writers have created landscapes of deluge. I recalled a Ray Bradbury story, 'The Long Rain' (1950), which is not about a storm but does describe perpetual heavy rain. It starts like this: 'The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow of the ankles; it was a rain to drown all the rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunnelled the soil and moulted the bushes...' Bradbury's science fiction story is set on 'the rain world of Venus', which by the time he wrote it was a poetic idea rather than a scientific possibility.

Bird’s Eye View of Western Tuscany

It can seem that in sixteenth century Italy, artists and cartographers worked on a continuum between maps and landscape paintings. Leonardo da Vinci’s Landscape (Arno Valley) 1473 has a high vantage point and some of the landscape features in it start to take on the characteristics of a map’s aerial perspective. As Malcolm Andrews has pointed out (Landscape in Western Art), the Birds-eye View of Western Tuscany of c. 1502 is half-way between a map and a landscape drawing, whilst Birds-eye View of Southern Tuscany – Val di Chiana c.1502 (below) can be more clearly categorised as a map. Both of these views were drawn during Leonardo’s time working for Cesare Borgia.

Leonardo da Vinci, Birds-eye View of Southern Tuscany

– Val di Chiana c.1502

Later in the century, Cristoforo Sorte (1510-95) performed a similar role for the Venetian government, producing beautiful charts like the Map of the Territory of Verona and Vicenza. A cartographer, engineer and architect, Sorte was also the author of the treatise on painting, Osservazioni nella pittura (1580), which includes comments on the art of landscape. The range of Sorte’s interests suggests that the poetic pastoral landscapes of Venetian art might have a connection with the practical concerns of Venetian land reclamation and chorography. However, Denis Cosgrove’s essay ‘The geometry of landscape’ suggests a deeper layer uniting these interests, since the mathematics involved in landscaping and the atmosphere of a painting were both seen as expressing the universal harmony of nature. Although Sorte did not explicitly write a hermetic theory of landscape painting, his treatise is, according to Cosgrove, infused with the sort of symbolism found in esoteric writing, and focuses particularly in dawn and dusk and the cycle of the seasons. Sorte advised painters to convey the variety of the seasons, from spring with its ‘diverse shades of green’, to summer when ‘the earth burns in the heat, as if its vital spirit were exhausted’, autumn, when ‘leaves turn russet’ and winter, with its mists, rain, frost and snow: an ‘earth shorn of all beauty’.

Thermal

Photograph reproduced on the wall of the Science Museum, London

In paintings like Thermal (1960) Peter Lanyon fused the roles of glider pilot and landscape painter. However, he was by no means the first painter to take to the air. One could go back to the stories of flying experiments by Leonardo da Vinci, or another polymath and painter, Paolo Guidotti. And in the twentieth century Italian Futurists were among many artists considering the implications of powered flight. However, long before Marinetti wrote his Manifesto dell Aeropittura (1929), a precursor to Lanyon was building some of the earliest successful gliders. José Weiss (1859-1919) was a Paris-born landscape painter who lived in England. Just as Lanyon drew inspiration from watching the seagulls flying around the cliffs of Cornwall, Weiss had a lifelong interest in birds, as is evident from his designs for gliders. Photographs show them to be beautiful constructions (and, incidentally, more reminiscent of the sculptures Lanyon later made than the streamlined post-war gliders Lanyon flew). The combination of scientific understanding and artistic flair has led aviation historians to liken Weiss to Leonardo (see the comments here for example). But how did Weiss’s researches into flight affect his painting? Unsurprisingly perhaps, hardly at all. His landscapes reflected prevailing trends, influenced by the Barbizon school and Impressionism. Here are some links to images currently on-line: Barbizon Lakeside Landscape with Path, The Stream and Barbizon Landscape.