Revival: Six Lectures on Painting (1904)

Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, January 1904

George Clausen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351344364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The chapters in this volume were delivered at lectures to students of the Royal Academy of Arts in January 1904 by George Clausen, who was at that time Professor of Painting. He approaches the subject a number of ways, including specific masters, styles, methods, techniques, contexts and composition. The book offers a balanced introduction to the subject, and to the modern reader, an insightful glimpse at an approach to this evergreen topic as delivered over 100 years ago.

V
ON LANDSCAPE AND OPEN-AIR PAINTING

THE main development of painting in the last century has been in the direction of landscape painting, and, as allied to it, of figures under the conditions of outdoor lighting —in the open air. We may go back to the Italian Primitives for the first landscape painters, although landscape was then only an accessory, and did not, as a rule, consist of more than a sky and a view of distant country, used as a back^ ground for figures. But these little glimpses of landscape, especially the skies, are most interesting and beautiful. I do not, indeed, think that skies have at any time been painted which give the feeling of light so beautifully, or a finer, purer sentiment in the landscape itself. There is a very fine instance in the large fresco by Pertigino in the National Gallery—a picture repre senting the ‘ Adoration of the Shepherds.’ The figures are in a field, under a very light and delicate sky. The tender sentiment of the scene is much the same as we find in the pictures of Corot.

In the little ‘ Crucifixion ‘ by Antonello da Messina, also in the National Gallery, there is a landscape—the effect is that of dawn—with a sky of the most beautiful quality ; and, among many others, there are two pictures by Ambrogio de Predis, a contemporary of Da Vinci’s, also in the National Gallery, which have, in their backgrounds, charming little glimpses of rivers and towns, painted very freely and sweetly, as one would like to see them painted to-day. And the picture of ‘ Christ in the Garden,’ by Bellini, shows a landscape splendid in the tragic sentiment of its colour, especially in the lurid sky. You know the picture ; the effect is that of nightfall. And there is also, in the background of a picture of a Magdalen by Savoldo, a beautiful little night-piece, with water, boats, and sky of a deep and beautiful blue. I should imagine it is one of the first ‘ nocturnes.’

One of the first men to treat landscape as the principal element in a picture was a contemporary of Dürer’s, named Patinir. There are some of his pictures in the National Gallery ; one, of a winding river between mountains, a very light picture, is a very interesting work.

We may consider Titian as the first great landscape painter, though in his paintings it was only an accessory ; but his construction of landscape by the use of shadows, of which I have already spoken, is one of the inventions or discoveries of painting. There are many fine drawings of landscape by him which you should see and study. His was, I think, the leading influence in treatment of landscape until the time of Claude and Poussin, when landscape painting may realty be said to begin.

There was an old Fleming, Peter Breughel, who did some beautiful landscapes with figures (he was principally a figure painter) in the sixteenth century, extremely rich in colour, and with a naïve rustic feeling that reminds one a little of Millet. I should imagine him to be the first ‘ rustic ‘ painter, and one of the best. After him, from Rubens, who painted many fine landscapes, we come down to Rembrandt, whose influence is still the leading one in the Dutch school. There is a little-known Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers, a landscape painter, who lived a little before Rembrandt, and is believed to have greatly influenced him in his feeling for landscape. I think only one of his paintings is definitely known ; but there are a number of very beautiful etchings in the British Museum, some printed in different colours, a method which he is believed to have invented. These are very remarkable works, and should be studied. From Rembrandt, through Ruisdael, Hobbema, Vermeer of Delft, down to our Norwich school, to Gainsborough and Constable, and to Turner, the connection is all clearly traceable and well known. The great French school of the forties—the Romanticists, as they are called—Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, and their allies, received their impulse through Constable. Delacroix was influenced by him also ; and the later impressionistic developments of landscape painting in France may be traced to the inspiration of Turner.

Any view of outdoor nature may be said to be a landscape ; it may be the barest record of facts, or it may give something like a vision, with hardly any support at all from facts : the range is very wide. But in what does the charm of a landscape consist ? It must be a record of a scene ; that is, it must be true to the appearance, and must show the facts of nature under the influence of some definite effect of light. But there must be something more. An accurate record of a scene, although it may be true to the facts, will not charm, will not move us so much as a picture where the effect, or sentiment, of atmosphere or light is the dominating motive.

Constable pointed out that painters should not think that the sky terminated at the horizon, but should realize that it comes all through the picture, and close up to us. That there is a particular tree, river, or hill in a certain place is of no great interest. The interest for us lies in seeing or recognising the great elemental forces of nature, living and acting in and through the little things upon the earth. A landscape should not be so much an inventory as a transcript or translation of a mood of nature. Its appeal is to the primi tive instincts—not to primitive people, not so much to people who pass their lives in the open air ; for they take nature and its changes as a matter of course, and look on the weather as a capricious master whose whims have to be met, and a tree only as so much timber, or flocks and herds as so much stock. This is really quite a natural and proper view, but the artist’s view is outside this ; and a picture of landscape appeals mainly to the primitive instincts of cultivated people, of people who live in cities, who look from the standpoint of civilization with a sentimental longing towards a more simple state. The French gallants and ladies of the eighteenth century liked to imagine themselves shepherds and shepherdesses ; and we, with our increased development of commerce and industry, have an increased appreciation of landscape, as if, since we cannot live with Nature, we would still be reminded of and be brought, even at second hand, into association with her.

The wide range of vision or treatment in landscape, as compared with that of figure painting, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at any rules which can be generally applied ; for selection of subject seems more determined by emotion or impulse, and less by reason, than in figure work. The landscape painter is more instinctive than the figure painter, and, as a rule, is less definite in his study of form, or seems so ; but has a finer sense of gradation of colour. But the building up of a landscape seems governed by pretty much the same unformulated rules as of a figure picture, and to depend on the same elements—the balancing of light by dark, and the contrast of warm and cool colour, so that the masses of the picture shall be agreeable to the eye ; and the study of pictures, carried on concurrently with the study of nature, is the only way by which a student can learn how he can bring his vision of nature within the limits of a picture. I mean, by the study of pictures, that the student should follow the plan indicated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, if a picture pleases him, take the trouble to note and, if necessary, make a memorandum of the general masses of light and dark, where they come, and in what degree, so as to learn the general disposition of the main things.

All the great landscape painters have presented Nature in the way I have indicated, as records of her moods. Claude, in his picture of the ‘ Queen of Sheba,’ did not, we may be sure, care about the Queen of Sheba at all. She was only a point for his picture ; nor was he much interested in the towers, columns, and palaces which frame his picture. What he wanted to paint, what he wanted to impress upon us, was the beauty of the evening sun shining in the clear sky over the sea ; and so well did he do it that the sun still shines in his picture, after over two hundred years. No one but Turner has ever equalled him in the knowledge of subtle gradations of light. An infinite space in air is suggested without forcing the range of colour ; for the lightest part of the picture is far from white, and the darkest part by no means black.

In another picture of his, ‘ The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca,’ also in the National Gallery, the subject is not the marriage, which is a mere incident, to give excuse for some figures as spots of colour, but the beautiful peep of sunlit country seen through the trees. In this picture we may remark how the dark trees accent the sky and the river, and how dark they have to be painted to express the lightness of the sky. Their colour is sacrificed to their tone. Claude did not wish us to look really at anything but the stretch of open country. We notice the trees, but our eye goes through to the distance.

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

Claude, National Gallery]

Approach to Venice

Turner, National Gallery]

Wilson and Turner followed in the same path. Wilson’s work is most beautiful in its direct, full painting, but he is limited in his range ; while Turner’s seems to know no limit, for he touched the extremes of light and dark, of sunshine and of gloom. Such pictures as the ‘ Shipwreck,’ the ‘ Sun rising in a Mist,’ and the ‘ Calais Pier ‘ show the power which he possessed—in which he is quite unapproachable—of giving the greatest minuteness of detail without losing the breadth of the general impression. In his later work, as in the ‘ Approach to Venice,’ detail was suggested rather than expressed, but it was fully suggested. How delicate, in these pictures of his later time, are the gradations, and how slight the intervals between the tints !

Turner’s enormous range, his comprehensive-ness, and the beauty of his vision should be studied in his drawings as much as in his paintings. I do not, indeed, know if the drawings do not to the artist express his qualities best.

The work of Constable touches on smaller things and the more homely aspects of nature. He sees things at close quarters ; his range is not so great. He felt the beauties of everyday nature, of trees and fields under the sky, and painted them with a clearness and a freedom from convention which were then new in art. As you know, when his pictures were shown in Paris in 1824, they were welcomed as a return from conventionality to nature, and made the point of departure for what is now known as the Romantic school, the finest group of painters that France has produced. ‘ The Valley Farm ’ in the National Gallery is, I think, one of his finest works. How beautifully his trees are drawn ! I think one of the most difficult things in painting is to paint a tree. The most difficult of all, perhaps, is to paint a sky which shall really be a sky ; but as this means that all the other elements in the picture shall be in accord with it, to paint a good sky is to paint a good picture. It is not so very difficult to copy a tree, but to paint it so as to make it live, to give us the impression of life that a tree gives us when we look at it in passing, or without sitting down to paint it, is a thing that few can do well. How often, when we set about painting a tree—or anything else, for that matter—we lose, even in looking at it, the charm that attracted us ! We get confused, I suppose, with the infinity of detail, and by our intentness on each particular part, or by analyzing each part separately, our minds are taken away from the general idea of the whole which made us wish to paint it ; and we end by getting a painting of the branches and leaves, but not the living tree. We miss it, somehow. One often sees trees painted that look all cut out at the edges, like trees on the stage, and when we look at the edges of a tree against the sky, we see that they look cut out, too ; but if we look at the tree as a whole—as a great green dome, spreading up and rounding into the sky, with the light shining on it and through it—if we can realize this, we can get a little nearer to our tree. Sir Joshua Reynolds touches on this in his discourses, and advises students to study the general masses and disposition of their trees, and not to devote themselves to painting each particular part.

Constable saw his trees as a whole, and so did Rousseau, Cecil Lawson, and Corot. Theodore Rousseau was the greatest French landscape painter of our time. There are two fine pictures of his in the Louvre—one, a marsh in the evening, and another of an opening through trees at sunset (I think there is a version of this in the Wallace Collection)—which are most perfect and beautiful things ; his work is fine in colour, severe in drawing, and has a wide range of effect. And Cecil Lawson, one of our best landscape painters, was very like Rousseau in his austerity and fine sentiment, and in his large view of nature.

One of the most delightful of landscape painters is Corot, whose work has a lightness of touch, and a kind of happiness in its delicate sentiment, which are altogether his own. He is another painter who arrived at ease of execution through beginning carefully and hardly. There are some of his early pictures of Rome in the Louvre, very beautiful, and, at the same time, very hard and precise ; and I have seen drawings—life studies —of his, all elaborately worked with the hard pencil-point. He was able to paint, or to suggest a tree, in the most delicate way. Constable, Rousseau, and Lawson preferred the sterner and stronger trees—the elm or the oak— but Corot loved the delicate trees, especially the willow, and effects of twilight or dawn ; and he rendered the mystery produced by tiny interlacing leaves, which look sometimes like a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I. Introductory—Some Early Painters
• II. On Lighting and Arrangement
• III. On Colour
• IV. Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt
• V. On Landscape and Open-Air Painting
• VI. On Realism and Impressionism