Revisiting the Canon: Graphic Landscape

Greg Smith, Engaging with the Voyage Pittoresque de la France: Thomas Girtin’s Picturesque Views in Paris and their appeal to the ‘most eminent in the Profession’.

This paper will consider the impact of the engraved views produced for the Voyage Pittoresque de la France (1781–1800) on the work of the British watercolourist, Thomas Girtin (1775–1802). Girtin’s studio at his death contained a number of ‘French prints … Landscapes’ and I will begin by examining the group of six watercolours that were directly based on engravings from the Voyage Pittoresque. The same publication also had a profound influence on the major outcome of Girtin’s stay in Paris in the winter of 1801–02, the twenty soft-ground etchings that were published posthumously, with the addition of aquatint, as Picturesque Views in Paris (1803). The radical playwright, Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), noted that he conducted Girtin to locations in and around Paris ‘that were esteemed the most picturesque … among artists’ and the artist’s knowledge of the French topographical tradition was clearly mediated by Holcroft; and this certainly helps to explain the similarity of Girtin’s panoramic drawings of the river Seine and the work of artists such as Jean-Baptiste Génillion. It is perhaps not surprising that the significance for Girtin of the work of his French contemporaries has been overlooked given the obscurity of the Voyage Pittoresque in Britain but the expansion in the topographical archive on both sides of the Channel make it increasingly untenable to consider Girtin’s work in isolation.

In the second part of the paper, I will look at the way Girtin’s engagement with French prints was part of a wider strategy of targeting his publication at one sector of the market: practitioners of landscape art. The recently discovered list of purchasers of his Views in Paris indicates that Girtin was successful in attracting the support of not only the male and female amateurs amongst his regular patrons but also what the publication’s prospectus termed the ‘most eminent in the Profession’. Amongst the artist subscribers was Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) whose series of Seine views was clearly influenced by Girtin’s prints such as St Germain en Laye, from the Terrace and who built upon his engagement with the French topographical tradition.

Timothy Wilcox, John Sell Cotman’s Architectural Antiquities of Normandy; A Catastrophic Miscalculation?

Cotman’s Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, nearly 100 large-scale etchings, published by the artist between 1820 and 1822, was his most ambitious project as a printmaker. It occupied him for more than five years yet, when he had finished it, he was bankrupt, almost suicidally depressed and determined to give up printmaking and publishing for good.

This paper will present Cotman’s Normandy as a grand project broken on the back of a profound shift in attitude in post-Napoleonic Britain. Having conceived his Normandy in a spirit of disinterested enquiry worthy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Cotman was, in effect, caught out by the patriotic fervour that gripped Britain after 1815. Cotman’s relative isolation in Norwich, a regional centre later dubbed ‘Jacobin City’ for its Revolutionary sympathies, and his involvement in the intellectual circles of Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney, who kept up an extensive correspondence with scholars in France, must have played a part in him embarking on a project which, in a nutshell, gave Norman-French culture priority over the English.

Apart from the social and political context, there were technical and artistic reasons for Cotman’s difficulties. His large etchings looked dated, appearing at just the moment that Samuel Prout was demonstrating the powers of lithography to capture the crumbling masonry of continental domestic and ecclesiastical architecture. Having concentrated so single-mindedly on completing the visual component of his magnum opus, Cotman paid relatively scant attention to the supporting text, to gathering subscribers and to distribution. The elements which should have contributed to the project’s success were lacking and Cotman’s lack of judgement of his place in a market suddenly crowded with similar productions proved fatal.

By his third French tour in 1820, Cotman was himself in doubt about his scheme and envisaged a series of landscape prints which, if completed, did have the potential to be his crowning achievement in the medium. In the event, after the failure of the Normandy, this project was abandoned. The finished drawings that remain are, however, a testament to another series of landscape prints which deserve consideration, if only because the circumstances of their non-appearance are so fascinating.

Gillian Forrester, A Glossary for the Anthropocene? Turner’s Liber Studiorum in the Era of Climate Change

In 1807, J.M.W. Turner launched the Liber Studiorum, a self-published series of etching and mezzotint prints made by professional engravers from his designs. Turner issued the prints in parts of five at irregular intervals, intending to produce a hundred in total, but abandoned publication after he published the fourteenth part in 1819. Turner did not produce a prospectus or letterpress and his few remarks concerning the project were enigmatic. He did, however, exhibit a brief handwritten text at his gallery stating his objective to produce ‘a classification of the various styles of landscape, viz., the historic, mountainous, pastoral, marine and architectural’. An initial letter denoting one of these categories was engraved above each image. Despite the apparent simplicity of this mission statement, the Liber is not a straightforwardly didactic ‘Book of Studies’ but rather a complex and unstable amalgam of different discursive models, including a treatise on European landscape art, topographical print series, drawing manual, travelogue, nationalist polemic and personal manifesto. The engraver John Pye later noted that Turner’s objective was ‘to demonstrate’ that he could ‘delineate everything that is visible under the sun’.

Why should we devote attention to the Liber Studiorum? Although the work has received sustained scholarly attention since the 1850s and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, I propose in this paper that Turner’s open-ended publication still offers possibilities for new readings as methodological approaches evolve. Turner’s taxonomy may also constitute a valuable model for art historians and practitioners as they develop new vocabularies to respond to the transformation of the world’s landscapes by climate change and pollution. A new lexicon of aesthetic terms is already in formation: in 2015, cultural historian Robert Macfarlane proposed the compilation of a ‘Desecration Phrasebook’ that might contain terms such as ‘trash vortices’ and physical geographer Stephen Tooth responded with his online Glossary for the Anthropocene, listing categories that included Anthroposcenic, Anthroposore, Glasstic Load, Capitolscene and Plasticene. I will discuss in relation to this evolving taxonomy the practices of Christiane Baumgartner and Emma Stibbon, two contemporary artists who make prints that explore the aesthetics of landscapes transformed by global warming and environmental degradation.