Picturing the landscape

Barrie Sheppard takes us on a tour of the landscape in the 19th century, seen through the eyes of two important English artists. Barrie writes: Seventeenth century landscape artist Claude Lorrain had a profound influence on landscape painters who followed him in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The great J M W Turner was one such artist.

On the other hand, for England’s other great landscapist of the time, John Constable, it was the works of the Golden Age of Dutch art which were a much greater influence – masters such as Ruisdael and the Flemish Rubens, as well as others, indirectly, through the works of Constable’s forerunner, Thomas Gainsborough. Constable did paint a “Claudian” landscape – his Dedham Vale of 1828, based on Claude’s Hagar and the Angel of 1646, a work owned proudly by his neighbor and mentor Sir George Beaumont.  Constable’s work draws on the “architecture” of the Claude composition, but without the diffused glow of light that fills its sky; Constable’s sky is typically cloud-filled and, like the Dutch landscapists, dramatically expressive.

It’s not surprising that the Dutch masters had such an influence on Constable. The landscapes they depicted were somewhat akin to those of the Stour Valley in Suffolk where Constable grew up, and to which he felt deeply attached all of his life – attached to its essentially flat, picturesque river landscapes, farmlands and huge dramatic skies. Of it he wrote:

It is pleasantly situated in the most cultivated part of Suffolk, on a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour,.. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well cultivated uplands, its wood and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.  This made me a painter.

For Turner, in his mid and later career, it was Claude’s treatment of light that  captivated him – Claude’s suns, albeit often obscured, but which nevertheless bathe his landscapes in a glow of diffused light.  Not surprising is this for an artist who is reported to have said on his deathbed that the “sun is God”.

Turner, unlike Constable, had nothing formative in his early life to attach him to a particular landscape, as did Constable, being born and raised in Cockney London’s Covent Garden, and its seamier precinct at that. The busy commercial waterway of the nearby River Thames was a fascination, and the rural settings of its higher reaches also drew him, but his attraction to non-urban subjects was much more catholic than that of Constable.

The features of the natural worlds that inspired the two artists are reflected in their travel destinations. Constable never left England, except for a brief visit to Paris when his Hay Wain was exhibited at the Paris Salon, where he was awarded a gold medal for it by King Charles X. Throughout his life he never lost contact with the Suffolk of his early years, dividing his time, for the most part, between it and his London studio. He did visit the Lake District in the north of England, spending two months there in 1806, but, according to his friend and biographer, C. R. Leslie, the solitude of the mountains depressed his spirits, he being drawn, wrote Leslie, to “a different kind of landscape”. Later art historians have challenged this view, pointing to at least 10 Lake District landscapes he subsequently exhibited, the NGV’s Keswick Lake being among them; and to numerous water colours as well as enthusiastic comments he wrote on the backs of some of the works. This, though, however true, doesn’t refute Leslie’s claim. 

Constable also spent brief periods in Hampstead and Brighton following their purer airs for the sake of his sick, tubercular wife, Marie. And, of course, the open skies of Hampstead were also an attraction. He also visited Salisbury, painting the Cathedral at the request of his friend, Archdeacon John Fisher. But the truth was that Constable preferred only those landscapes for which he had an emotional attachment. And the scenes in the Stour valley in Suffolk had that for him in spades.

For Turner, the world was potentially his canvas. After all, his “god”, the sun, was everywhere!  He crisscrossed the landscapes of Wales, visiting it three times. He spent time in Yorkshire, the Lake District, The Midlands, Scotland, and the south-east and south-west of England. He walked the landscapes he visited, up to 15 to 20 miles a day, drawing and sketching, filling hundreds of sketchbooks with notes, drawings, sketches and annotated diagrammatic outlines. His journeys were well-organised: food, appropriate clothing, shoes and maps were always carefully prepared.

In 1802 he took the opportunity of a brief cessation of hostilities between France and England to cross the channel, visiting the Louvre and travelling through France to Switzerland where he made drawings of the Schaffhausen Falls on the Rhine from which he made numerous paintings over the years, including the NGV’s Falls  Schaffhausen (c.1845).The defeat of Napoleon in1815 allowed for, and marked, the beginning of a series of further visits to Europe in 1817, 1819, 1828, including France, Switzerland, Austria, and to Italy, particular to Rome and Venice.

Ironically, Constable, who didn’t travel to Europe, apart from his brief visit to Paris when his Hay Wain along with three other works were exhibited there, had a greater influence on European art in the nineteenth century than did Turner. He was greatly admired and extolled by Delacroix, and influenced  the naturalist and realist artists of the Barbizon School, such as Corot, Theodor Rousseau, Daubigny. Turner, on the other hand, had little influence during the same period.

The palettes of the two artists reflected their primary inspiration. Given Constable’s spiritual commitment to the landscapes of “Constable Country” it’s not surprising that his signature colour was green, rather than the traditional sepia browns of traditional European landscape art. When Sir George Beaumont advised him early in his career to give his landscapes the sepia patinas of the old masters’ works. Constable placed a violin on the grass in front of Beaumont and pointed out that nature around them is not the colour of the violin. On another occasion, when the two were painting en plein air, Beaumont asked Constable where in his picture he was going to place a brown tree. Constable responded by pointing out that the trees around them were green!

Given Turner’s “worship” of the sun, yellow, orange and red hues play a dominant role in his palette, as we might expect. The Fighting Temeraire being an instructive example, as is his Claude-inspired Regulus, painted in Rome during his Italian tour of 1828 – the story is of the Carthaginian Regulus being blinded by the sun when the Romans forced him to stare at it after they had cut his eyelids off. Turner depicted Regulus as a small insignificant figure, barely visible, the main focus of the picture being the blinding light of the sun diffused across the entire composition.

Turner and Constable were England’s greatest landscape painters of the nineteenth century, but they couldn’t have been more different. Constable painted naturalistic landscapes to the end of his life. Turner’s late works bordered on the abstract to such an extent that some art historians have suggested that he prefigured the Abstract Expressionists of the mid-twentieth century. Mark Rothko, a great admirer, reported to have once quipped: “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me.”

For Turner, the sun, his god, was everywhere. and so can Turner be if we rise early enough:

Mr Turner rose early this morning    ere his God, the Sun, emerged in person –    rose to touch layers of streaky clouds, orange and vermilion among patches of blue, and mere minutes later, grey puffballs teased by upper winds into whispy tangles of tangerine threatening a cloud bank yet to be finished.