Canaletto and the image of Venice

Canaletto & the Art of Venice at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (19 May – 12 November) showcases one of the most important collections of 18th century Venetian art in the world.  More than 200 paintings, drawings and prints – all from the Royal Collection – explore how Antonio Canaletto (1697 – 1768) and his contemporaries captured the allure of this most evocative of cities.

As much as to any artist, the exhibition serves as testament to Joseph Smith, collector, dealer, artist’s patron-cum-agent, and (when he had time) British consul in Venice from 1744 to 1760. Smith’s collection was bought almost in its entirety by George III in 1762 to furnish the newly purchased Buckingham House (later Buckingham Palace).  In fact the paintings now on display were a £10,000 royal afterthought once the bibliophile King George had secured Smith’s magnificent Library.

The Porte Del Dolo c.1740, etching

The artists of this last great cultural flowering of the maritime Republic – before it was swallowed up into Napoleon’s European empire – shared a sense of theatre, and an appreciation of  the interplay of light and colour. The son of a leading theatrical scene painter, Canaletto elevated landscape painting while his peers concentrated on their more respectable ‘histories’, allegories and portraits. His market was foreigners, particularly the British – who (encouraged by Consul Smith) snapped up his glistening veduti of canals, palaces, churches and piazzas. Canaletto’s architecture is a glorious backdrop to the regular festivals, masques and ceremonies of the Venetian calendar.

With his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto started making etchings in the early 1740s, mostly real and semi-imaginary landscapes inspired by the Venetian mainland. The 31 plates resulting from a journey the two artists made along the Brenta canal were published as a set in 1744 – a kind of prospectus – with an engraved title page dedicated to Smith.

Title plate with a dedication to Joseph Smith 1744, etching

Almost inevitably, these black and white compositions are a little overshadowed by the larger, showy, brightly painted canvasses hanging in the adjacent rooms. After all, the prints were not originally intended for framing and display like pictures, but were bound in an album on Smith’s shelves. Nonetheless the true print lover cannot help but be impressed by the range of light and shade skilfully evoked by varying the space between sinuous etched parallel lines. There is very little of the sometimes rather crude cross-hatching employed by northern printmakers to produce tone.

Final word goes to Canaletto’s large canvasses showing Grand Tourists pottering about the classical ruins of Rome. Each little group has a dedicated guide, identifiable by his sober black attire, pointing out the arches and antiquities half-buried in silt.

The Arch of Septimius Severus 1742, oil on canvas

The Wonder of Wisdens

It is rather remarkable when you think about it that the 153rd edition of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack was published last month by Bloomsbury.

The ‘cricketer’s bible’ started life as an 116-page pamphlet produced by retired bowler John Wisden (known as ‘The Little Wonder’ due to his short stature), to promote his sporting goods and tobacco business. (The link between sports, advertising and the wicked weed goes back a long time.)  If he knew that the little yellow book bearing his name was still being published – in basically the same format, though rather chunkier –  a century and a half later he’d be bowled over.

And what would he make of an auction price of £8,400 achieved in recent years for one of those first 1864 Wisdens (cover price: one shilling)?

Most ventures into sporting annuals last a few editions and die – the periodical published by Wisden’s principal commercial rivals, the Lillywhite family, did not make it beyond 1900.

An 1864 First Edition,  from Wisdens.org

Wisden has overseen the boom times and the lean years for the summer game with an independent eye. The fluctuating number of pages reflect the fluctuating appetites of the sporting public, the national mood and economic fortunes.

The suspension of First Class cricket during the years of World War I meant that the Almanack for 1916 could report only on school cricket – but crucially Wisden stayed alive.  At 229 pages it is the slimmest edition since 1882 (the 2016 Wisden comes in at 1,552 pages).

Many of them are given over to reporting death.  Greats of the game W.G. Grace, A.E. Stoddart and the Australian batsman Victor Trumper were not killed in the service of their King and Country. But a long alphabetical list of young men that follows, schoolboy and university cricketers, bears tragic witness to the first full year of conflict in 1915.

A 1916 Wisden (53rd Edition)

One name that leaps from the page is Sub-Lieutenant Rupert C. Brooke (Royal Naval Division).  His six-line notice records a leading bowling average of 14.05 for the Rugby School XI and concludes with the famously pithy sentence: “He had gained considerable reputation as a poet”.

The precise intentions of the Editor, Sydney H. Pardon, are debated by Wisden historians.

My listing of Cricketana – including a very rare 1916 Wisden – can be viewed here:  Cricket 2016

Georgian satire: the shock of the old

Since last month’s post inspired by my caricature of Mary Anne Clarke (see Mrs Clarke in the House) several readers have asked me about collecting satirical prints.

James Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in danger, Pitt and Napoleon carving up the globe. Sold for £15,000 at Bloomsbury in June 2015.

Well it so happens I have penned an article on just that subject for a special supplement to the Antiques Trade Gazette (cover date 26th March 2016)

The early 1780s witnessed a new phenomenon, the professional caricaturist.  And it was a uniquely British phenomenon. Only in Britain were the three conditions – freedom of expression, party politics, and a receptive market – combined.

Read my article on the Georgian heyday of the single-sheet satire here:  Georgian satire: the shock of the old

There is plenty to interest the bibliophile in the newly-published supplement.  It can be read online in full here:  Books, Maps & Prints

Something Fishy in Revolutionary New York

It’s often said that we humans see what we want to see, and particularly it seems when directed by an artwork’s title or caption.

The subliminal power of text to influence the way we look at an image always amazes me – it’s something I’m very aware of when I’m buying prints. It is all too easy to uncritically accept the identification of a sitter or location, or the attribution to an artist.

L’Arrive du Prince Ouillaume Henry a Nouvelle York. Etching with contemporary hand colouring by Balthasar Friedrich Leizel or Leizelt. Augsburg, Germany, c.1782.

I must confess when I first set eyes on this print I was guilty of reading the legend a little unquestioningly. The engraved lettering above and below the marine composition (in both French and German) proclaims the arrival of the ship carrying a young Prince William Henry, the future King William IV, into New York on the 16th October 1781.

Read the rest of Jasper’s article on the interplay of original art and print across international borders here:    ARTICLE for the January 2016 ABA Newsletter (PDF)

House Hunting

I get lots of requests from clients looking for old prints of their houses. We’re talking old houses natch, with considerable local history, connections to a good family name, and perhaps of some architectural significance. These are usually not houses of national, or international, renown. The lodge or gatehouse, but not the big house up the drive. You know what I mean.

These seekers often have to be very patient, sometimes not hearing from me for years, and I can empathize. For 15 years I have been on a personal quest for historical images of my parents’ house in Lincolnshire.

1820s hand-coloured engraving of Aslackby, Lincolnshire

My search has been frustrating at times – located in a part of the country not overly blessed with lavishly-illustrated county histories, the house has a somewhat obscure provenance and is not associated with any famous past residents, or great historical occasions.

I have heard tantalising tales of an engraved illustration in this or that book, maybe by one of the Buck brothers (Samuel and Nathaniel, prolific topographical draughtsmen in the eighteenth century), maybe by someone else. The closest geographically I have come so far in terms of old prints is a small c.1820s engraving of a neighbouring village, and two more substantial views of the nearest market town.

A fellow Ephemera Society member was kind enough to let me scan this postcard of my parents’ village – featuring the very house in the upper right corner. (He doesn’t want to sell.) He tells me he’s seen with his own eyes a postcard that is a full-size photo of the house alone. Wow.  Privately published, presumably in a very small print run, at the height of the postcard boom of the early 1900s. I could flick through the ‘Lincolnshire’ section of every stand at every postcard fair for the rest of my life and not come across it. Doesn’t quite seem worth it.

c.1910 photographic postcard of Dowsby, Lincolnshire

He did sell me a c.1910 handwritten bill from a local printer to a prominent former owner of the house, which is a nice little connection.

I was once very excited to see sale particulars of an early 20th century auction of the house offered very cheaply online – complete with interesting photographs and estate map – but was told the item had been sold a few days earlier and not removed from the website. Frustrated again.

I enjoy browsing old family scrap albums, all the rage in Victorian times, which can reveal very personal insights into the lives and times of their compilers, and the places in which they lived. What are the chances…?  Amateur watercolours from the 18th and 19th centuries vividly record not only architecture and topography, but can contain incidental details that have acquired considerable interest in their own right – for example fashions in dress or interior decoration. These drawings are often found in a diary or sketch book, often the work of a young lady of the house, and often very finely executed – wealthy families could afford to employ quality drawing masters.

I live in hope, dear reader.

The Spirited Mr Rowlandson

A bloggers’ preview last week of not one but two new exhibitions at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.  A bijou selection of high-quality genre paintings from the Golden Age of Dutch art more than competed for attention with one of the most brilliant draughtsmen and printmakers England has ever produced: Thomas Rowlandson (1757 – 1827).

The display of around 100 prints and drawings explores the life and art of one of this country’s most popular caricaturists. Social satires were his staple, but often the political intrigues of Parliament and the Court attracted the scrutiny of his quick-fire wit and flashing, free-spirited pen.

Rowlandson was a roving gun for hire, happy to direct his ridicule in whatever direction his patron or publisher of the time required – always with that arresting combination of invention and artistic flair. The exhibition includes satires against William Pitt and the Tories as well as against Pitt’s great rival Charles James Fox and his Whig acolytes.

It is perhaps surprising that Rowlandson’s output was so popular with both George III and George IV, father and particularly son so often the butt of the joke. Queen Victoria apparently acquired more of his prints than either of her Hanoverian predecessors.

And pictorial satires of the Georgian and Victorian periods remain highly collectable to this day.  The market has been rejuvenated by a recent upsurge in scholarly research into this intriguingly fluid, hybrid medium that seems to straddle simultaneously the worlds of art, journalism, literature and politics.

Commanding the centre of the largest gallery is this c. 1806 four leaf screen (left), pasted with carefully arranged figures and scenes cut from satirical prints (the work of various artists, French and British).

This is a rare survival, the sort of thing I would love on my stand at a fair – think of the visitors it would attract.  These screens were popular adornments to the fashionable parlours of the Georgian and Regency periods, the ultimate statement of a trend for pasting prints onto everything from tea caddies to tables to the walls of billiard rooms (see my earlier post on this theme: Furniture Prints).

Printsellers’ catalogues and trade cards of the time offered selections of their wares intended for this very purpose.  Publishers too got in on the act – Isaac Cruikshank’s set of ‘Caricature Ornaments for screens’ was advertised in 1800.

Such screens could also be purchased ready-made.

Either way, they make for wonderful after-dinner conversation.

High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson showing at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace with Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer.  13th November 2015 – 14th February 2016.

Old Prints of Country Houses

Antiquarians, discerning homeowners and interior designers alike have long appreciated that prints of country houses can add charm and sophistication to an interior, as well as historical interest.

‘Long Leate’ by Jan Kip c. 1720

Good quality prints from the 18th and 19th centuries are very affordable, thanks to the plethora of county histories and architectural works that were published. This was the great age of building private houses when aristocrats, inspired on their Grand Tours, commissioned architects to reinterpret the Italian villa in the British countryside. Images of their houses – alongside those of the gentry and the aspirational businessmen and financiers of the age – were included in often lavishly produced volumes known as ‘plate books’. The owners subscribed to these publications on condition that their particular country pile would be represented.

Please click HERE to read the rest of my article for July’s Pall Mall Art Advisors Newsletter

Painting Paradise

Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden explores the many ways in which the garden has been celebrated in art through over 150 paintings, drawings, books, manuscripts and decorative arts from the Royal Collection.

The exhibition runs from 20th March to 11th October at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1615

The display is arranged chronologically – cleverly incorporating garden-feature props – and explores what gardens have meant to people over the centuries.

Biblical notions have permeated garden design from the outset – the word ‘paradise’ derives from the ancient Persian for an enclosed, protected space and through the book of Genesis has become intertwined with visions of the Garden of Eden.

The precedents of classical antiquity were, as one would expect, prominent in the minds of the Renaissance gardeners. A small c.1550 pen and ink and chalk drawing by an unidentified draughtsman (once attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci) is one of the first attempts in Italian Renaissance art to depict a garden accurately.  It probably shows part of a villa garden used for cultivating medicinal herbs, with regular rectangular beds.

That’s me on the left!

By way of total contrast, I particularly enjoyed the magnificently large and sweeping vista of Hampton Court rendered in oil by Leonard Knyff (1650 – 1722). The bird’s-eye prospect of the Palace perfectly exemplifies the Anglo-Dutch formality of patterned parterres and avenues fashionable at the time.

Leonard Knyff, A View of Hampton Court, c.1702-14

Knyff’s drawings were turned into etchings by Jan Kip, a fellow Dutchman born in Amsterdam. Kip’s series of plates known as ‘Britannia Illustrata’ were first issued in 1707 in a single volume of eighty. The distinctive views of country seats, instantly recognisable by their aerial perspective, are as much concerned with the formal landscape gardens as with the houses themselves. I myself have recently acquired the plate of Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire.

The freer style of landscaping that emerged in the 18th century, by such luminaries as William Kent and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, is well represented. This incorporated formal structures and wilderness elements. The exhibition ends with some contemporary interpretations, via the age of Victoria, the first monarch to hold garden parties at Buckingham Palace.

Well worth a visit.

Bonaparte and the British

To mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo – the final defeat of the brilliant French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) – the British Museum have put together a wonderful exhibition of British and French satirical prints.

The free display runs from 5th February to 16th August and is well worth a special visit.

The period of Britain’s struggle with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France between 1793 and 1815 coincided with the richest seam of talent for caricature that this country has ever produced.

The compositions of Charles Williams, George Moutard Woodward, Richard Newton, Thomas Rowlandson and the incomparable James Gillray combined originality, perceptive wit and considerable artistic flair. The attacks could be brutal – both in terms of the narrative and visually, with grotesquely distorted faces and forms. But in some cases the subversion of the traditional rules of draughtsmanship as laid down by the art establishment was extremely inventive and, it occurs to me, ahead of its time.

The Corsican Spider. In his Web. Etching by Thomas Rowlandson

The satire is complemented by more sober works and official portraiture. A collection of anonymous and very competent watercolour sketches of the battlefield are dated two days after the fighting. They bear grim testament to the savagery and scale of the slaughter on that Sunday in June 1815. The ghostly pale bodies of soldiers, stripped bare by trophy hunters, are still seen lying on the ground in of one of the drawings.

Among other printed material on show is this poster advertising a reconstruction of Admiral Nelson’s great victory over a French fleet on the Mediterranean coast off Egypt in August 1798.

Charles Dibdin, the theatre manager at Sadler’s Wells in London’s Islington, installed a water tank and attracted large patriotic crowds, their morale perhaps needing a boost as Napoleon’s victorious progress across the Continent continued.

It features a wood engraving of the French flagship L’Orient exploding at its centre.

Accompanying cabinets of curios include a group of metallic souvenirs collected by none other than Lord Byron from the field of Waterloo during his visit in 1816 – soldiers’ decorations etc.

On a totally unrelated subject, I was pleased to observe that prints were accorded their rightful prominent place in the decorative schemes of several room-recreations at the Geffrye Museum, during a recent visit. Next time you find yourself in east London’s trendy Hoxton do pop in!

Drawing room, 1870 at The Geffrye Museum

Mr Turner

I rather enjoyed Mike Leigh’s gently paced and whimsical meander through the latter years of the landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851).

Mr Turner

Permeated with a profound sense of mortality (death was after all a constant companion in the 19th century), the film was illuminated by witty characterization and I think rendered a passable impression of the times in which the great artist lived.

Though I couldn’t help but notice the prints which adorned the walls of almost every interior in the film (Mr Turner’s own displayed Hogarth engravings), the film made no mention of our eponymous hero’s own ventures in printmaking.

This comes as little surprise. Turner’s major foray, his ‘Liber Studiorum’ of landscape compositions, is little known outside art history circles. The artist himself etched the outline of each image onto the copper plate, working from a drawing he had made for the purpose. He then closely supervised carefully selected printmakers such as Charles Turner, S.W. Reynolds and Thomas Lupton as they added their mezzotint and engraving (and, in a few cases, aquatint).

Ploughing, Eton / Liber Studiorum (etching)

The project was ultimately a commercial failure that was abandoned after 71 plates had been published irregularly in parts between 1809 and 1817.

Aesthetically, the sepia impressions achieve mixed results. Some are quite atmospheric but on the whole rather staid and rarely do they capture the vitality of the artist’s pen.

The Hindoo Worshipper / Liber Studiorum

JMW was not an innovative or creative printmaker, certainly compared with some of his contemporaries who achieved acclaim as painters (particularly on the Continent).

But he was acutely aware of the power of reproductive prints to spread his fame and (not least) enhance his fortune – though had he seen some of the many thousands of products of the “Turner print industry” he might have let out a particularly audible grunt of consternation.