Painting – and Printing – with Light

If you can get along to London’s Tate Britain before the 25th September, I recommend Painting with Light, an exhibition celebrating the links between early photography and art in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

It cannot be described as a glamorous blockbuster, and the images are generally small and intricate.  Not for the faint hearted, it nevertheless repays close attention (and, just, the entry price). The subject is overdue closer scrutiny, as very often painting and photography-as-art are treated in isolation.

Jane Morris (wife of William) posing for artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Doyens of the Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic and impressionist movements used photographic images as inspiration, as an alternative to the preparatory sketch, or as aid to composition. Photography presented a new, revelatory way of seeing the world, and therefore seeing art. From the 1850s books and journals were illustrated with photographs instead of engravings and lithographs, and the publications of learned Victorian societies were the forums for this conversation.

Many who had trained as artists became photographers, especially portraitists. From the introduction in 1851 of the wet plate process, which produced sepia-tinted positive prints, the number of professional photographers increased from 51 to 2,534 by 1861.

The Lady of Shallot by Henry Peach Robinson, 1861

As technologies for the taking and developing of photographs improved, many artists saw landscape in new ways.  The beauty and ‘truth’ of wonderous mother nature – which Romantic artists like Constable and Turner sought to capture – was traditionally deemed to lie in the accurate rendering of detail, based on close observation. Now artists became more concerned with immersing the viewer in atmospheric effects of light, shade and colour.

Many photographers were, in turn, inspired by artists to push technical boundaries and experiment with lenses, exposures, chemical treatments etc.

I see photography in this period as essentially another form of printmaking. A couple of engravings from steel plates feature in the exhibition, demonstrating that traditional printmakers still had an important part to play in the creation, reproduction and dissemination of art.

Ultimately, this show goes to prove that whatever the chosen means of expression, art advances through the imagination and talent of the artist, and their impact on the viewer.

 

Madam Merian’s Butterflies

Between 15th April and 9th October The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace hosts what I believe to be the first major UK exhibition devoted to the German artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717).

Inspired by the natural history specimens in the cabinets of curiosities owned by her neighbours in Amsterdam, Maria and her daughter Dorothea set sail for Suriname, South America, in June 1699. From her base in the capital, Paramaribo, Merian set out with local guides into the surrounding forests to find caterpillars to rear and observe.  Her primary interest was insect metamorphosis, but she was also interested in the tropical plants and animals. She stayed until ill-heath forced her return to Amsterdam in June 1701.

Maria Merian’s Butterflies tells Merian’s story through her works in the Royal Collection, acquired by George III in c.1810.  Many are luxury versions of the plates of the magnum opus that resulted from her Suriname expedition, the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (the Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname). Usually known simply as the Metamorphosis, it was finally published in 1705.

Merian took partial impressions from the Metamorphosis plates and worked up and coloured the faint etched outlines herself (with the help of her daughters) to create unique works of art.  The only other known set with this special treatment is in the British Museum. They were probably created to raise money for publication of the standard editions.

Branch of West Indian Cherry with Achilles Morpho Butterfly , 1702-03

The exhibition also includes exquisite watercolour and bodycolour drawings on vellum by Maria and her daughters.

As the daughter herself of a prominent Frankfurt printer and publisher (Matthäus Merian), and the step-daughter of a professional artist who taught her flower painting, Merian was uniquely suited to the formidable task.  With insider knowledge of the brush, the pen and the tools of the printmaker, she achieved perhaps the most harmonious marriage of art and science in the whole story of natural history illustration.

Integrity was important to Merian: her art was always rooted firmly in scientific observation. When some element of naturalism was sacrificed in the interests of aesthetics – such as introducing the juvenile Golden Tegu lizard onto the cassava plant below – she owns up to it in her text.

Cassava with White Peacock Butterfly and young Golden Tegu, 1702-03

This pioneering female biologist made some genuine scientific breakthroughs:  she categorically demonstrated that the caterpillar, pupa and butterfly states were phases in the lifecycle of the same insect. The scientific consensus of the time was that one insect gave birth to another then died.

You too dear reader can own the work of this remarkable and indefatigable woman. Be aware that plates from the Metamorphosis are often found with modern colour (editions were originally sold both in black and white and hand-coloured).  The giveaway is often inaccuracy – Merian described in great detail the colours and patterns of the creatures she examined.

Merian was also fascinated by the reptiles that she encountered in Suriname and planned a lavishly illustrated follow-up on the subject, although she was unable to achieve this before her death in 1717.  Science and art are the poorer for it.

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.

Witches and wicked bodies

A very Happy New Year to all my subscribers!

On Sunday I managed to catch the final day of the ‘Witches and wicked bodies’ exhibition at the British Museum.

The bulk of the display is prints and drawings from the BM collection, supplemented by loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean in Oxford, Tate Britain, the British Library and an unnamed private collector.

Agostino Veneziano fl.1509-1536) The Witches’ Rout

The gallery was packed with visitors – some decidedly ‘gothic’ in appearance – who enjoyed extraordinary imagery from classical Greece (some decorated pottery was included) through to the Pre-Raphaelites.  Between sets of shoulders I glimpsed a high quality selection of artistic responses to evil, the occult and that which lies beyond the understanding of men.

Beyond the understanding of men, yes – but perhaps not necessarily of women. A fear of the potentially malevolent power of women over men forms a continuous thread through the centuries, no doubt revealing a male anxiety to maintain the patriarchal order of western society.

The Renaissance works I found particularly striking, possessed as they are of remnants of the medieval imagination and lacking the contrivances of more modern periods – this was after all a time when witchcraft and sorcery were real concerns, so to speak, in people’s daily lives.

Castiglione’s Circe changing Ulysses’s men into beasts, etching c.1650

Giovanni Battista Castiliglione‘s Circe encapsulates female indifference to the sufferings of men as she nonchalantly surveys the companions of Ulysses whom she has somewhat casually turned into various animals.

A group of witches from Goya’s Los Caprichos series, 1799 etching

The fluid and sinuous style of Francisco de Goya was uniquely suited to depictions of grotesque bodies doing grotesque deeds, and this exhibition could not have been contemplated without a smattering of his etchings.

Artists of the Romantic period and into the 19th century saw traditions of witchcraft through the filter of literature and drama. I did enjoy reacquainting myself with Henry Fuseli’s 1785 mezzotint ‘Wierd Sisters from Macbeth’ – a print that has been through my hands – the three hags with their craggy, hairy, very masculine profiles.

Fuseli’s Wierd Sisters, 1785