(3) The Development of Subject-Matter and Technique
After what has been written above it is to be hoped that the dangers attending the use of the word “development” have been exorcised. We intend to use the word merely as a synonym for chronological sequence, and we have been careful to point out that the historical order in which artists appear does not coincide or run parallel with any growth, advance, progress, or improvement in the artistic value of their work.
Shorn thus of its stolen finery of theoretical prejudice and philosophical imposture the naked course of chronological sequence presents few attractions to the enthusiastic lover of the beautiful. It has, however, its uses. These are mainly mnemonical, for it supplies the thread on which we string together in our memory the things strewn along the schedule of the years without apparent rhyme or reason. The dates will not help us to pick out the good from the bad, but they help us to place among their proper surroundings the good things which our sympathies and instincts find for us.
With this grudging apostrophe to the historical maid-of-all-work we will proceed with our survey of the brief tale of years during which our national school of water-colour painting has been in existence. The business of this chapter is to outline the development of form and content, of subject-matter and technique.
For the beginnings of British landscape painting we must look to the drawings and engravings connected with the study of topography, using this word in the ordinary sense of place-drawing, or the description of a particular building or spot. Generally speaking the designs of the earlier draughtsmen are now known only through the engravings which were made from them. Roget, in his “History of the Old Water-Colour Society” (chapters i and iii, Book I) gives a full and interesting account of these engravings. The earliest drawings we need refer to are those of Samuel Scott (1710-1772) and his pupil, William Marlow (1740-1813), Paul Sandby (1725-1809), William Pars (1742-1782), Michael Angelo Rooker (1743-1801), and Thomas Hearne (1744-1817).
Working alongside these artists was another group of men who produced “landscapes” which relied for their interest rather upon the sentiments evoked by their subject-matter and treatment than upon the purely topographical character of their work. These painters of poetical or sentimental landscape may be said to have begun with George Lambert (1710?-1765), Richard Wilson (1713-1782), and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Of these only the latter used water-colour as an independent medium. His Landscape with Waggon on a Road through a Wood (British Museum) reminds one somewhat of the landscape studies of Rubens and Van Dyck, at least as regards the colour-effect and the feeling for atmosphere. Through Gainsborough the influence of Rubens and that of the Flemish conception of landscape painting was brought to bear on British art, while Lambert and Richard Wilson familiarized the younger artists and their patrons with the style and aims of Poussin and Claude. The same influences are discernible in the works of Alexander Cozens (d. 1786) and his son, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799), both of whom worked almost entirely in water-colour.
The works of these painters of poetical landscape taught the public to demand something more emotional in feeling and more dignified and impressive in treatment than the prosaic transcripts and conventionally composed drawings of the topographers. Their example also taught the rising generation of artists, amongst whom we find Edward Dayes (1763-1804), John Glover (1767-1849), Joshua Cristall (1767?-1847), F. L. T. Francia (1772-1839), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), how to meet those demands.
In Turner’s Warkworth Castle (V. and A. Museum), exhibited in 1799, and Girtin’s Bridgnorth (British Museum), painted in 1802, we find these two streams of influence uniting. These drawings are at the same time both topographical and poetical; each represents a particular place with a good deal of accuracy, but in such a way that the drawing might just as correctly be called a poetical landscape as a topographical representation.
This combination of fact with emotion, of representation with poetry, has remained during the whole of the nineteenth century and down to the present day the dominant characteristic of British landscape painting. Sometimes the topographical factor was subdued or almost submerged, as in the water-colours of George Barret, junr. (1767-1842) and Francis Oliver Finch (1802-1862), but it is generally predominant, though always in combination with emotional or poetical expression, in the works of William Havell (1782-1857), David Cox (1783-1859), Peter De Wint (1784-1849), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), G. F. Robson (1788-1833), Samuel Prout (1783-1852), William Hunt (1790-1864), Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), David Roberts (1796-1864), J. D. Harding (1797 or 8-1863), R. P. Bonington (1802-1828), T. Shotter Boys (1803-1874), J. Scarlett Davis (1804?-1844), J. F. Lewis (1805-1876), W. J. Muller (1812-1845), William Callow (1812-1908), Birket Foster (1825-1899), A. W. Hunt (1830-1896), E. M. Wimperis (1835-1900), Tom Collier (1840-1891), and J. Buxton Knight (1842-1908).
The course of development of the subject-matter of British landscape painting in water-colour we may, therefore, say has been somewhat as follows: it started with the object of recording as clearly and accurately as was possible the appearance of buildings and places, and it did this, not for purely artistic reasons, but in the interests of antiquarian, archæological, historical, or geographical information; by the side of this place-recording activity there sprang up a series of painters who aimed at the production of landscapes as the means of artistic and emotional expression; we then find these two groups acting on each other, the poetical school teaching the topographers style, design, “atmosphere,” and emotion, and the topographers directing the attention of the poetical painters to the observation and study of nature and the expression of their own personal emotions; and the outcome of this process is the present school of British landscape painters in water-colours, which attempts, both in its highest and in its lowest efforts, to do full justice to the progressive demands which the educated public has thus learned to make on the artist.
We turn now to the development of technique. The earliest topographers worked on white paper, on which, after the subject had been outlined in pencil—such outlines being sometimes enforced with pen and ink, the general system of light and shade was washed in monochrome; the local colours were then washed over this preparation. The method, so far as the colours were concerned, was somewhat similar to that of tinting or colouring an engraving. In drawings executed in this manner by Sandby, Rooker, and Hearne the brilliance of the colours is somewhat subdued by the grey underpainting. But this is probably due to the fact that the artists worked only with their washes of transparent colour, relying upon the white paper asserting itself through these washes. The luminous effects produced in this way—in drawings like Sandby’s Windsor: East View from Crown Corner (British Museum) and Rooker’s St. Botolph’s (V. and A. Museum)—have been so much admired that many living artists have deliberately gone back to this simple way of working.
The effect of the grey underpainting on the finished work is, however, largely dependent on the artist’s wishes. If he chooses to sacrifice the luminosity of the white paper he can paint over his preliminary washes with colour so heavily charged that it will practically annihilate them. This is what Girtin generally did in his later works, though it must be added that he also changed the colour of his preparatory washes from grey to brown. I am inclined to think, therefore, that Redgrave has exaggerated the importance of the use or disuse of these preliminary washes.
The earlier poetical painters, like Lambert, and Sandby in his larger compositions painted for exhibition purposes, worked in body-colour, i.e., opaque white was mixed with all the colours. In this way some approximation to the force of oil painting was obtained. Another way of getting a similar result was to work with the paper wet. A good example of this method is Turner’s Warkworth Castle. In this picture Turner tries to do in water-colour what Richard Wilson did in oils. He gets his effects of deep rich tone and force of colour by working with a heavily charged brush, sponging, and wiping out the lights with a dry brush or handkerchief or scraping them with a knife.
The methods of Warkworth Castle were practically those used by the younger Barret, Varley, Copley Fielding, Cox, and De Wint, but after about 1830 we find opaque white coming into general use, at first merely to give increased force to the high lights, but later it was mixed freely with all the transparent colours, and toned or tinted paper was used to give greater brilliance to the body-colour. John F. Lewis worked in this way, but the hardness and glitter to which it so easily conduced led to its abandonment by the later artists who set themselves to render the delicate gradations of the atmosphere. Yet one must admit that in the hands of a master technician like Turner all the unpleasant qualities so often apparent in body-colour work can be avoided, as the Rivers of France drawings prove. At the present time some artists, who aim especially at force and brilliance of colour, prefer to work in tempera, but it is doubtful whether this medium can rightly be regarded as a form of water-colour painting.
On the whole we may say that the technique of water-colour has changed very little during the last two centuries. The chief change has perhaps been connected with the introduction, about 1830, of moist colours put up in metal tubes, a great convenience to artists in search of bold effects without the expenditure of much time or trouble. But even this has proved a doubtful advantage, and many artists have now gone back to the use of hard cakes of colour, similar to those with which the earlier men obtained their delicate and luminous results.