Between Worlds: English Prints of the Waldensian Valleys 1823-1850

English Prints of the Waldensian Valleys 1823-1850

Most of you have seen works Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great English painter, who inspired Monet and the French Impressionists and whose major paintings are in London at Tate Britain. A new film about him was highly praised at The Cannes Film Festival (slide).

Turner is most famous for his oil paintings of:

The Castle at Norham, Northumberland where William Gilly, the benefactor of the Waldensians was vicar, while Turner was often staying there

“The Fighting Temeraire” (slide)

JMW Turner is also famous for being a champion of watercolour and engravings as an art from 1800-1860, England led Europe. Because they could not print colour, the only way that readers could enjoy pictures was through engravings, in black and white such as these of England by Turner:

Launceston

Richmond

Dartmouth

Landscape painting was the leading art form of 19th century Britain. The English travelled everywhere, and took paints with them. They drew and wrote about where they have been to encourage other visitors and inform those who would never leave England. Educated English probably still value cultural tourism above all other pleasures, even good food. Visiting Italy has always been a primary pleasure for the English, who see it as a ‘magical’ and sunny country. One of the main reasons for travel in 1830, was to locate picturesque scenery, which could soon vanish, and draw it. Active in doing this were many amateur artists, who took drawing lessons, including young women.

The landscape artist helps to “open the eyes of the blind” to beauty and to God, to see the landscape as a Temple of the Divine, a reflection of its Architect, God. John Ruskin in his book Modern Painters aimed to show “the perfectness and eternal beauty of the works of God”. This attitude was common in Victorian England. In fact, people ‘read’ landscapes and engravings as poetic expressions of God’s Creation looking for their moral or symbolic meaning in them. So we too should understand the engravings of the Waldensian Valleys in the same way and particularly so: in these, English artists were showing spiritual man and woman in a spiritual, ideal landscape something usually reserved for illustrations of the Bible.

The art of landscape art from from Claude Lorrain (slide), a French artist who lived in the 17th century whose landscapes were classical and ideal. Landscape art had a kind of pattern. Slide

There were usually peasants active in the foreground, a river, far mountains, light coming through clouds. Later fashions added enduring buildings such as churches, or ruined castles. There was often a “blasted” tree in the foreground. A favourite viewpoint was from the middle of a river.

There were also ideas about various types of beauty. One kind of beauty was pastoral and harmonious beauty, such as verdant pastures and gentle hills. Another was dramatic scenery called “the sublime”. This creates fear about the power of Nature God as Judge. The English crossing the Alps were awestruck by this kind of scenery and also fascinated by drawing it.

In these prints of the Waldensian Valleys you see all these elements: the sublime mountains, the peasants, the buildings, the ruined castles, the blasted trees and the light of God breaking through.

I am going to show you four sets of engravings based on watercolours, taken from books about the Waldensians. These show the valleys before new churches and buildings in Torre Pellice were built. They show the clothes of the Waldensians in the 1830s.

The first two are by Englishmen, professional artist Bartlett and a young amateur called Hugh Acland. The second two are by women, a noblewoman, Hon Mrs Fortescue, who illustrated Rev William Gilly’s first book in 1823 and his wife Jane Coberg, who illustrated Gilly’s second book.

I find two amateur women’s art superior possibly due to their spiritual element. They had taken private lessons with a professional artist, XXXXXX, who beautifully engraved their work.

woman in a spiritual landscape. Indeed, I may be prejudiced but I find Jane Coburg’s engravings more satisfying than some of Turner’s.

I find Jane Coburg’s valleys speak to me about the loving provision of God, the protection of the mountains, an ideal, spiritual and special landscape made sacred by its history. It describes spiritual man and

The Golden Age of British Watercolours 1760-1850

by Alison Bailey Castellina (baileyannis@gmail.com)

Landscape painting was the leading art form of 19th century Britain, which also happens to the great age of British watercolours (1760-1850). The British have been the leading innovators in the art of watercolour, both in technique and in the development of equipment. Many influences came together during this period to make British watercolour artists the leaders in Europe in this medium. They were artistic, literary, philosophical, religious and technical.

This age happened to coincide with the Romanticism, which values spontaneity and fluidity which watercolours offers, and a thirst for exploring exciting new vistas, to experience and record them. It also coincided with the life and work of the European master, JMW Turner, and with that of the leading art critic, John Ruskin.

Watercolour with its purity, translucence and fluidity was a perfect medium for a century which was simultaneously nostalgic, religious and romantic. The Georgian and Regency period sought to depict Nature in its naturalistic grandeur, rather than as an ideal or convention: the Victorians also wanted to convey a vision of religious awe. Every place has its own spirit and when a gifted artist, attracted by a view or place reflects that in painting, the result reflects something of their own vision and religious spirit, too.

The result was many thousands of beautiful watercolours, in my view strongly contrasting with bleaker inner and outer landscapes during the 20th century, when such ideas of glory and religious transcendence went out of fashion. Modern watercolours often reflect the preoccupations of modern life in natural surroundings but lck transcendence, so studying this Golden Age transmits to us forgotten, wider philosophical ideas. These ideas in themselves enhanced pictures, their composition and atmosphere and enlarged their scope.

John Ruskin in his book Modern Painters aimed to show “the perfectness and eternal beauty of the works of God”. This attitude was commonplace in Victorian England. In fact, the public ‘read’ landscapes as poetic expressions of the divine, looking for their moral or symbolic significance.

William Wordsworth in his poem, The Prelude, attributed to Nature influence over one’s moral development. Some went so far as to see landscape painting as a religious calling, in itself.

Such a view was expressed by watercolourist Albert Goodwin (1845-1932) who painted in a Ruskinesque manner and produced some very collectible watercolours. He said that that “Beauty is a sealed book to many”. Thus the landscape painter and watercolourist is helping to “open the eyes of the blind” to beauty and the divine. For Goodwin, watercolour’s material purity enhanced its translucence. JMW Turner took the view that no painter can match the translucence of Nature and just before he died, Turner, an admirer of Wycliffe and nonconformism, but not known for his formal religion - is supposed to have commented : “The sun is God”.

The Genre of Landscape Painting

Landscape painting was already a genre in its own right, developed by Claude Lorrain in the 17th century in oils and by Dutch painters who specialised in pink-faun sails, low afternoon light, isolated windmills, dykes and lowing cattle. The Norfolk school of painters like “Old Crome” excelled in painting Dutch boats, in choppy seas, off Yarmouth - and they formulated some rules for watercolour.

There were by tradition two main genres : the pastoral and the ideal.

pastoral landscapes showed man dominating Nature, crowding it out with his own achievements: fields, ditches, canals, livestock, wealth, fertility as a result of his hard labour. This was Man in his economic landscape.

ideal landscapes such as those of Claude Lorrain showing a landscape that never existed which also crowds out Nature - but certainly is suffused with the longings of the inner eye and touches on the divine and glorious, perhaps as a reflection on pre-Fall creation or on a mythical “Golden Age”. This is Man in his ideal landscape.

John Ruskin, in his introduction to “Modern Painters” mocks the ideal landscapes of Claude Lorrain, whom he much much admired, possibly thinking of paintings like Claude’s “Landscape with the Marriage of Rebecca and Isaac” (1648):

dancing peasants by a brook across a meadow with tame bulls
goats dipping into water
a line of marching soldiers
a distant ruined classical Temple near a mill and a weir
people fishing from punts
a distant city, possibly ancient Rome with towers, with further views of the Campagna
beyond that, mountains, as from Turin with its circling Alps - but actually the Apennines.
on the left, the cascades of Tivoli.

Ruskin argued that there is no truth in such landscapes: they never existed. Thus, he argued, his contemporaries were wrong to argue could that Turner, who Ruskin deemed to have excelled the Great Masters in both landscapes and seascapes, was not true to Nature in his mistiness, in his impossible-to-survive sea storms and in his famous “indistinctness”. When asked about this, Turned either said “Indistinctness is my fault” or “Indistinctness is my forte”. I prefer the latter.

The real achievement of the English watercolourists of this period was to take a static and as yet not fully developed European tradition focused on the ideal, to borrow the painted sun from Claude’s great paintings and merge that with England’s beauties, adding certain philosophical elements. Finally, in Turner’s great last watercolours, the art of watercolour reached its zenith.

The key names of this development are: William Gilpin, Paul Sandby, Francis Towne, John Robert Cozens, Thomas Girton, John Sell Cotman and Joseph Mallord William Turner. (See links below for their paintings on BBC’s Your Paintings)

The Picturesque

Revd William Gilpin was a parish vicar and Prebendery of Salisbury Cathedral in 1794 when he published “Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel and on Sketching”. A dogmatic man and amateur watercolourist, he determined to define “the picturesque”. The picturesque is “what seems right in a picture”.

In the first essay, Gilpin explains that beauty in most objects is simplicity, order and smoothness except in picturesque landscapes, where desirable objects possess broken surfaces, roughness, much contrast in texture and much light and shade. “The picturesque” needs mountains, rocks, blasted trees, lakes and ruined temples, castles, abbeys which “Time has consecrated”, like Nature itself.

In the second essay, Gilpin writes about the whole point of travel being “to reverence and admire the works of God and to look with benevolence and pleasure on the works of Man”. The objective of the traveller is “to discover beauty of every kind”. Gilpin coined the terms “picturesque eye” and “picturesque traveller”, who having left behind care and worry is intent on seeing new scenes with “religious awe”, “every distant horizon providing something new”.

His approach and tone which dominated the last years of the 18th century was much satirised by Jane Austen. However, according to the book “Jane Austen and the Clergy”, the two topics of the conversation of the clergy she lived among were apparently a) breaking in horses and b) identifying “the picturesque”. So Gilpin’s ideas were certainly strongly influential among the clergy in particular, possibly due to the wider influence of Capability Brown, who had opened up rigid formal gardens to the infiltration of Nature, banishing formality.William Gilpin’s books encouraged “landscape tourism”, people going off to identify and sketch the most perfect natural view, in order to paint it later, in their room.

The picturesque view should ideally include a castle, church or well-shaped ruin, a river, three but not four cows, grouped in the foreground, a lake, river or inlet from the sea, certain types of trees and peasants. Such was the eccentricity of some of his ideas that he preferred Oliver Cromwell to Henry VIII, on the grounds that Cromwell slighted his castles “more picturesquely” than Henry VIII slighted his abbeys. Gilpin even advocated taking a mallet to some ruins, to make them more picturesque. This was the kind nonsense that put Jane Austen into fits of giggles! Gilpin’s works is still quite readable if still rather rigid and dogmatic.

The Beautiful and The Sublime

Another influence was Edmund Burke in his “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. He separated “the beautiful” and “the sublime”, as two categories of landscape. The beautiful is about harmony and smoothness, a sun rising at dawn over calm water or a wide river. The sublime is scenery before which Man is powerless which reminds him of the power of God to crush and confound him, the effects of the Fall, which therefore arouses in Man fear, awe and fascination. Clearly, this is the sea storm, the avalanche, the rolling rocks and the towering, lowering Alps.

So we can see in the English watercolour artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a strong awareness of Claude, Burke, Gilpin and Canaletto - the famous topographer of Venice and London, whose engravings young Turner and Gilpin spent time copying and watercolouring. Incidentally, engravings were the way that the general public encountered watercolours, since there were few exhibitions of watercolours. So when Turner prepared his views for the book “Picturesque Views of the Coast of Southern England”, England and Wales, Scotland, Rivers of England and Europe, these were in watercolour, which professional engravers then turned into prints, for general sale, in books. Needless to say, Turner’s watercolours for engraving in these publications are now worth a small fortune.

Narrative and symbolism in art

Another element which contributed to this remarkable British achievement in watercolour was the development of ‘landscape narrative‘ or ‘landscape as symbol’. One can be an accurate topographer and draw in ink, or graphite, then fill it in with watercolour, but such works can be lifeless, even if interesting to us today historically as representations of Man in his historic landscape. They rarely tell a story, convey the unique atmosphere of a place - or symbolise a deeper hidden meaning.

For centuries, there was a hierarchy in art. Myth, narrative, historical painting which conveyed a moral message was deemed “high art”. Everything else fell well below that level, with watercolours, the realm of dabblers, women and amateurs. Turner, in his genius, sought to enoble watercolour, using narrative and grandeur, mystery and “the sublime”.

Ruskin says:

“There is scarce a piece of quiet water (in Turner’s art) without some story in it”.

This is true of his watercolours too, where Turner positions himself and Man in his economic and historical landscape. Incidentally, his viewpoint is often from the middle of the river.

JMW Turner, Professor of Perspective at The Royal Academy, was considered an artist in oils of landscapes and seascapes. This gave him status in the art world, but he made his living from watercolours, which he manufactured on a conveyor belt, and often sold to nouveau riche. He used a technique of plunging paper with washes in buckets of cold water and hanging them up, in a marbled state, on washing lines, in his studio. He also had an aspiration to turn watercolour into the equivalent of oils, by giving them atmosphere, narrative and moral grandeur - which some consider his late watercolours of Venice and Lucerne fully achieved.

What is watercolour?

Watercolour, technically, is pigment suspended in gum arabic from the acacia tree. Watercolour was probably used for cave paintings. Delicate watercolour was used for illuminated manuscripts, Tudor miniatures, Durer’s hare, for all botanical painting (a field dominated by women) but certainly not for historical painting - lacking permanence, richness and fading in strong sunlight.

Nature itself could be said to fall between the translucence of watercolour and the brightness of gouache, which is why some artists use both watercolour and gouache, known as “bodycolour” which gives the colour opaqueness and substance. If, in the late 18th century, you were an artist aspiring to fame, you avoided watercolour. Watercolour was the preserve of amateurs and inferior to oil painting. JMW Turner changed that.

Until about 1800, watercolours had to be prepared in a studio, but due to a technical advances, blocks of watercolour enabled spontaneous, and therefore “en plein air” painting. You could sketch in watercolour outside, even creating, as Turner did, “colour structures”. Those going on the Grand Tour in 1800 could paint what they saw in the open air, to share with those at home. Then, from around 1830, watercolour paint could be carried around in tubes, like toothpaste, enabling darker hues to be used, en plein air. All this contributed to a very keen public interest in watercolour, in the age before photography

Turner: the late watercolours

Using these advances in equipment and technique, Turner took watercolour to its highest potential by 1840, conveying in his last watercolours, between 1840 and 1850 (particularly those of Venice and Lucerne 1840-1844) the mystery, the glory and the grandeur of Nature in all its fluidity, colour and light.

Water, light and watercolour came naturally to Turner. In addition, he had moved from a dark to a light, bright palette after his first trip to Venice in 1820 (once Italy opened again after Napoleonic wars) so that the light in his late paintings is the light of Venice. This is true also of his late oils, notably “The Fighting Temeraire”. It is notable that he used watercolour “wash” appearances in his oils. This may be made easier by using a lighter palette.

Turner’s legacy

JMW Turner made his living by watercolours, which he largely sold, not through his oils which he hoarded, refusing to sell the best, in order to give them to the Nation and they are now in Tate Britain in the Clore Gallery. He felt misunderstood in his own time though eminent and dominant - and finally buried in St Pauls next to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

He felt that future generations would venerate him more than his own contemporaries. He wanted his whole work to be seen as a whole - which we can now do through the online collection of his notebooks and works on paper, on Tate Britain website. He even painted in oils for future generations.

Regarded in his day as either mad, indistinct or ‘not true to nature’, it was his devotee, John Ruskin who assured Turner’s place in the pantheon of leading European artists, organising his collection for the nation, his 37,000 works on paper. This has helped to raise his status above that of Constable and Landseer, who were his contemporary competitors for artistic immortality.

Turner was a great experimentalist. It is no accident that Turner painted Norham Castle, near Berwick on Tweed, throughout his lifetime. He said that before his first picture of Norham Castle he was nobody and after that he could not churn out paintings fast enough. He would go back to do it, again and again, to see how he himself had changed and developed and what greater mystery, or indistinctness, in oil or watercolour, he could add to this meaningful spot of dormant, ancient hostility between England and Scotland.

Turner’s last watercolours and his “colour structures” are the subject of the book “Turner’s Great Watercolours”. They are poetic utterances, fading off into both the sublime and the beautiful. The last watercolours including the trio of the red, dark and blue Rigi, a great mountain on Lake Lucerne have the power of oils. This kind of study is similar to Monet’s later studies of Rheims Cathedral at various times of the day.

A notable last Turner watercolour for me, is the Arsenal in Venice, in red watercolour, which conveys a sense of sublime evil, not dissimilar to his watercolour depiction of Satan and his cohorts.

Turner’s paintings - he used the art of watercolours to inform his late oils- are part of the direct line that links Canaletto and Claude through Turner to the French Impressionists. Claude Monet saw Turner’s work in London.

The market value of watercolours

Watercolours, today, are affordable, in a way that quality oil paintings never will be. Watercolours are useful for decorating moderately-sized homes, if one does not hang them in full sunshine. Today, one can buy Victorian watercolours in London galleries or (for example) at Bonham’s auctions partly because they are still misunderstood and undervalued. Some watercolours of late Victorian watercolourist Helen Allingham sell for under £1000. Her famous pictures, familiar as notelet scenes of Woman in her landscape (in the Surrey hills) can command auction prices around £30,000.

The lowly status of watercolour explains why the works of William Widgery, a late Victorian watercolourist of semi-sublime and semi-picturesque landscapes of Devon and Dartmoor are still reasonably affordable.

Naturally, Turner’s great watercolours are worth millions - but they are still worth only a fraction of his oil paintings - though the last watercolours are not inferior in terms of their artistic achievement.

Bibliography

“Turner: The Great Watercolours” by Professor Philip King (£15 secondhand on Amazon)
“British Watercolours” by Katharine Coombs
“Turner’s Watercolours” Tate Gallery
“The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880” Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles
“Great British Watercolours”, Yale Centre for British Art

Online Google Books - some readable online with access to Turner’s engravings