ENGLISH LANDSCAPE ARTISTS Drawings and Prints Prints and Drawings Galleries/June 26-September 6,1971 r,«> V ' ^JKtA^fmrf .^r*^{. v! •,\ ^ ^fc-^i I- 0 It has long been recognised that there is a special affinity between the English people and landscape. As painters and sketchers of landscape, as lyrical nature poets, and as landscape gardeners (of the Nature-Arranged school as distinct from the formal continental embroidery-parterre style) the XVIIIth and early XlXth century English outstripped everyone else. Moved by more than just the romantic spirit of the times, the English, although fascinated by impassioned anthropomor­ phic renderings of storms, also enjoyed serene pictures of the familiar out-of-doors. Starting at least as far back as the XVIIth century with a topographical interest, portraits of their own homes and countryside have always appealed to the English, the way color snapshots of favorite places still do. The people who could afford to have painters and engravers make bird's-eye views of their house and grounds in the XVIIth century were also travelling on the continent, looking at the Roman campagna and collecting both paintings and drawings of it to take home. By the XVIIIth century, having trained their eyes to accept and even enjoy drawings, English gentlemen hired drawing masters to teach their children how to "take a landskip". Many a drawing master and even well-known painters, finding that they needed to supplement meagre incomes, wrote and illustrated books of instruction. While a few drawing books were produced elsewhere, they were mainly devoted to figure drawing, but the English (and also the American) ones were extremely nu­ merous, and almost entirely devoted to landscape. The experimental, imaginative landscapes of Alexander Cozens set an example for his very talented son, John Robert Cozens, whose watercolor views (usually of Swiss and Italian sites, for he traveled extensively on the Continent) bring English draughtsmanship to the peak of perfection. These watercolors stand as independent works of art that may be compared with the finest landscape paint­ ing. Gainsborough had earlier established the fashion of imaginary landscape views in a tradition that harks back to the lyrical landscape manner of Claude Lorrain, whose style was also a paramount influence in the work of Richard Wilson. Cozens brought the art of drawn records of actual sites to a new poetic intensity. It is not surprising that both Turner and Girtin's early training in Dr. Monro's "Academy" was based on the copying of J. R. Cozens's landscape drawings. Samuel Palmer is an exceptional figure, somewhat out of the main stream, and his observations of the countryside at Shoreham are charged with a mystic intensity. Turner, of course, unquestionably dominates the nineteenth century, and his in­ comparable gifts as a painter of landscapes are as much apparent in his drawings and watercolors as they are in this full-scale paintings. To illustrate drawing and travel books, printmakers began developing existing print techniques in order to imitate drawings and to reproduce paintings and watercolors accurately. Soft-ground etchings and crayon manner were used to imitate line drawings extremely successfully by John Crome, John Sell Cotman, and John Robert Cozens. Very often one must look twice to be sure whether one has a drawing or a print in hand. Watercolor drawings were imitated in aquatint by Paul Sandby (who imported the technique from France), by the Havell family, and by Joseph Stadler. Even though aquatints were finished by hand with touches of color, the underlying color-printing technique was exquisitely precise, conse­ quently in most aquatints there is nothing free and swift. For that effect in prints one must wait until 1841 for the lithographer James Duffield Harding. Striving toward the imitation of wash drawings, Harding used an idea of the lithographic printer and publisher, C. Hullmandel, to make what he called lithotints - in effect, strong brush drawings in black ink. Mezzotints were used by David Lucas to reproduce John Constable's paint­ ings. Constable supervised the production of the mezzos very closely, correcting and reworking the plates so many times that the over-finished results lack the dramatic spontaneity of the early stages. The museum's very early proof of Lucas' mezzotint of Hadleigh Castle, with its masses of dark wind-swept clouds pierced by blinding light creates the very feel of the wind and the rain, even the noise of the sea birds calling as they ride out the storm on the air currents; the finished plate is dull and less interesting by comparison. Turner's paintings and drawings were reproduced in many different tech­ niques, but probably the most successful were those finished in mezzotint by other artists working over Turner's own outline etchings. Inspired by Claude Lorraine's Liber Veritatis as mezzotinted by Earlom, Turner produced his Liber Studiorum, which was published in parts, containing five prints each, from 1807 to 1819- The wrappers were labelled "Part — of Liber Studiorum, Illustrative of Landscape Composition, viz. Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine and Archi­ tectural". The kind of composition represented in each print is indicated by a letter at the top margin, as M for Mountainous, etc. The publication, whatever else it might also be, is a kind of drawing book. Having learned from the Italians to study light, to look at large vistas rather than intimate detail, and to compose a landscape by rearranging its elements and moving mountains if necessary, English artists also learned from the Dutch. Souvenirs of Ruysdael can be found in the work of John Crome and in the early paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. Rembrandt's etched landscapes can be seen echoed in Muirhead Bone's Southampton from Eling, done in 1903: the technique and choice of subject matter shout "Rembrandt". Recognising the sources and the derivation of the work of English land­ scape artists is not our purpose in this exhibition. English artists did use the eyes and the techniques of others, especially the Romans and the Dutch, but they fused what they took into something truly English and truly beautiful by means of their own sensitivity to landscape of any kind. This checklist supplies the essential information; bibliographical refer­ ences are limited to the standard and most recent publications, and in most cases these cite the full bibliography. This exhibition has been jointly organized by Janet S. Byrne, Curator, Department of Prints and Linda Boyer Gillies, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings. ENGLISH LANDSCAPE ARTISTS, DRAWINGS AND PRINTS DRAWINGS JOHN ABSOLON (1815-1895) A Review in Hyde Park Watercolor. 8 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches (21.6 x 36.8 cm.) Lent by Charles Ryskamp THOMAS SHOTTER BOYS (1803-1874) A Street in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Seine) Watercolor. 12 15/16 x 8 13/16 inches (32.8 x 22.3 cm.) Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, 67.55.9 WILLIAM CALLOW (1812-1908) Caesar's Tower, Warwick Castle on the River Avon, about 1850 Watercolor. 14 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches (36.2 x 26 cm.) Bequest of George D. Pratt, 48.149.24 DAVID YOUNG CAMERON (1865-1945) Bridge at Angers Watercolor, over black chalk. 7 7/8 x 8 9/16 inches (19.9 x 21.7 cm.) Study for a picture, Dark Angers, in the City Art Gallery, Manchester, England. Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, 67.55.12 DAVID COX (1783-1859) Wooded Landscape with Castle in the Distance Watercolor. 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 inches (25-1 x 37.2 cm.) Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Ted Farah JOHN ROBERT COZENS (1752-1797) On the Gulf of Salerno, near Vietri, 1782 Watercolor, over faint traces of pencil. 14 3/8 x 20 7/8 inches (36.7 x 53 cm.) BibI: Jacob Bean, 100 European Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1964, no. 99, repr. (with previous bibliography). Rogers Fund, 07.283-3 Vesuvius from Sir William and Lady Hamilton's Villa at Portici, 1782 Lead pencil on tracing paper. 7 1/2 x 18 7/8 inches (19-1 x 47.9 cm.) Bibl: C. F. Bell and Thomas Girtin, The Drawings and Sketches of John Robert Cozens, Walpole Society, XXIII, Oxford, 1934-1935, no. 238. Rogers Fund, 07.282.4 The Villa Lante on the Janiculum, Rome, about 1783 Watercolor. 10 x 14 1/2 inches (25.3 x 36.8 cm.) Bibl: C. F. Bell and Thomas Girtin, The Drawings and Sketches of John Robert Cozens, Walpole Society, XXIII, Oxford, 1934-1935, no. 364, pi. XXVIIb. Rogers Fund, 67.68 WALTER CRANE (1845-1915) Italian Farmhouse Watercolor. 10 9/16 x 14 1/2 inches (26.8 x 36.8 cm.) Rogers Fund, 1971.66.3 PETER DE WINT (1784-1849) 10. A River Watercolor. 16 x 21 1/2 inches (40.6 x 54.6 cm.) Exhib: London, Thos. Agnew & Sons, Ltd., "Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by P. de Wint", no. 26. Lent by Mrs. Walter C. Baker GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT (1755-1797) 11. Two Figures with Cattle and a Goat Lead pencil. 10 15/16 x 7 3/4 inches (27.8 x 19.7 cm.) Bibl: Mary Woodall, Gainsborough's Landscape Drawings, London, 1939, no. 464, pi. 98 (as Gainsborough); John Hayes, "The Drawings of Gainsborough Dupont," Master Drawings, III, no. 3, 1965, p. 250. Rogers Fund, 11.66.1 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH (1727-1788) 12. Wooded Landscape with Figure, Horse, and Cart Watercolor and gouache, over black chalk. 9 1/4 x 12 5/16 inches (23.5 x 31.3 cm.) Bibl: John Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, London, 1971, no.