A Wider View: From Collaboration to Empire: Graphic Landscape

Sarah Moulden, Creative Collaboration: Cotman’s Norfolk etchings

Between 1811 and 1822, John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) dramatically scaled down the watercolour practice for which he is now renowned in order to focus on etching. Self-taught, he published an astonishing 365 plates across six volumes during those years.

Cotman's concentration on printed volumes, mostly depicting architectural antiquities in the East Anglian and Normandy landscapes, coincided with a decade-long residency in Great Yarmouth. There he received the formal patronage of local banker and well-known antiquary, Dawson Turner, to whose family he taught drawing. Turner financed at least two of Cotman's most ambitious volumes, the first being Architectural Antiquities of Norfolk (1818), produced on a speculative basis and for which the banker anonymously provided the letterpress.

While the traditional view that Cotman was little more than Turner's draughtsman during this time has now been largely refuted, there is still a tendency to view his etchings unfavourably in relation to his earliest watercolours, with a visual character so strictly prescribed by Turner that there remained little room for the artist's own agency.

In this in-focus presentation, I want to propose that the Norfolk publication was in fact meant as a high-quality artistic product resulting from a creative collaboration between Cotman and Turner, who shared a playful approach to the antiquity-rich landscape of their home region. Their collaboration, and the visual effects it produced, raises questions about the status of artistic authenticity, identity and experience during the period, which I will consider through a close reading of a couple of the Norfolk’s plates and their letterpress.

Eleanore Neumann, Translating Topography: Women and the Publication of Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1836)

In September 1833, Maria Graham (1785–1842) wrote to fellow British artist and travel writer Selina Bracebridge (1800–1874) asking her to send sketches of thirty different sites from Palestine and Lebanon. As part of her anonymous and unrecognised editorial work for the two-volume Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1836), Graham gathered topographical landscapes drawn by artists travelling throughout the Middle East. Leading painters of the day, such as Graham’s second husband Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, J.M.W. Turner and Clarkson Stanfield, elaborated the sketches which were then translated into print by William and Edward Finden. The impetus for the huge undertaking came from the pre-eminent publisher John Murray who was responding to a growing taste for Biblical scenes. Murray had previously published Graham’s own travelogues and hired her as a ghost writer for Lord George Byron’s official account of the voyage taken by H.M.S. Blonde to Hawaii (1826), thus making her a good fit for the project. Graham was also familiar with earlier print series such as Turner’s Liber Studiorum (1807–1819) on which she loosely modelled the landscape illustrations that were published in her own Latin American travel accounts.

In this paper, I question what Graham’s example can tell us about how women not only consumed but also aided in the production of landscape print series in the late Georgian period. She and Bracebridge were the only women who contributed original sketches to the two-volume Landscape Illustrations of the Bible: one by Graham and six by Bracebridge. The process of translation is documented in each volume, thereby allowing readers to fully grasp the relationship from the site of production to the site of consumption and from the topographical landscape to the historical landscape. Countering predominant notions of female amateur artists in the early nineteenth century, I argue that women such as Graham and Bracebridge contributed – through less visible means – to public discourses on landscape, history and science amidst rapidly changing attitudes toward religion. As Graham’s own landscape practice diminished upon returning to the competitive London art world from her travels on the margins of the British Empire, she successfully sought out new modes of cultural production.

Alisa Bunbury, Taken From Nature: Printed Views of Colonial Australia

Occupation of the Australian continent began in 1788 and, during the first years of settlement, images were predominantly visual records of the developing town of Sydney, the ‘non-descript’ flora and fauna, and the Indigenous owners of Country. The first printed series of topographical views showing the surrounding environs and nascent townships didn’t appear until 1798, illustrating a first-hand account of Sydney’s formative decade. As with most of the early images, these were painted by a convict artist before being translated into print in London.

This, however, changed with two following series created in New South Wales in the 1810s. The first landscape prints made in the colony were published by an emancipated convict, Absalom West, who employed convicts and free artists to produce a set of etchings (1812–14) – crude by European standards but nevertheless important. A subsequent series, made under harsh conditions in Newcastle’s penal settlement (1816–18), was created less as a commercial enterprise but rather to highlight the professional achievements of the commandant of the settlement and the governor of the colony. The principal artist for these designs was Joseph Lycett who, upon receiving his freedom, returned to London where he produced his series of scenic aquatints, Views in Australia (1824–25), clearly intended to promote emigration and investment.

This paper will briefly discuss aspects of these early print series, each published under different circumstances and with differing intended outcomes. Significant in colonial Australia’s visual history, such prints were typical of the views of provincial townships, foreign places and, later, sublime scenery being published across the British Empire and in North America. While recognised by art historians, this aesthetic context remains underacknowledged in Australia and these series are little known elsewhere. Inevitably such images require reinterpretation today regarding imperial domination, environmental impact and representation of First Nations people, as well as analysis by First Nations’ historians.

Douglas Fordham, Travel Prints or Illustrated Books?

In the decades around 1800, on the cusp of England’s ‘Illustration Revolution,’ prints documenting travel and exploration were often sold (and taxed) as illustrated books. This paper considers the importance of narrative, text and numbered plates to the ways in which these prints (many of which were landscapes) were marketed, viewed and interpreted. What are the implications of viewing these printed serial objects as books rather than as portfolios or series?

The single-sheet intaglio prints that I will examine by William Alexander and Thomas, William and Samuel Daniell are often considered as unique works of art by collectors or as discrete units of historical and architectural evidence by scholars. Digital imagining has further separated these prints from the bindings and textual descriptions for which they were originally intended. This essay considers how pioneering ‘artist-publishers’ broadened the market for landscape art, while promoting new narratives about state, nation and empire. I will suggest that many of these works deployed landscape as a stable interpretative frame for the representation of lands and peoples that eluded clear textual analysis. Even so, descriptive text was considered indispensable to the prints in question and the book format was a necessary condition for establishing the work’s truth and authority. By insisting on the ‘bookness’ of print series such as Oriental Scenery, The Costume of China and African Scenery and Animals, we can learn a great deal about transformations in the British publishing industry and glimpse intimations of the Illustration Revolution to come.