cAstles And brItIsh lAndscApe Art

cAstles And brItIsh lAndscApe Art c.1750–1950

sam smiles

THE DEPICTIoN oF CASTLES IN BRITISH ART has a very long early history, from idealized presentations in medieval manuscripts, through the more accurate notations of surveyors and topographers in the Tudor era to their presentation in the landscape paintings of the seventeenth century. `e majority of these early images depict buildings in everyday use; few of them are concerned with ruined structures. However, the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar in the mid-seventeenth century and, following him, Francis Place, the first English artist to develop landscape as a specialist pursuit, included depictions of ruined castles as well as inhabited ones in their works and their example may be taken as the beginning of the modern fascination with castles.

As part of the national scene, medieval castles had the potential to be incorporated in landscape images but their inclusion was not inevitable, nor did their presence always signify the same thing. `ey might be regarded as architectural curiosities, as relics of feudalism, or as symbols of a lost chivalric sensibility. What unified these newer representations was a sense of the castle’s increasing separation from the modern world. Up until the seventeenth century castles could still be regarded as capable of fulfilling their original function and many of them were garrisoned during the Civil War. By the close of that century, however, what a castle stood for was becoming associated primarily with an epoch that was fast retreating into history. Although some were still inhabited, and could be further improved for domestic comfort, their ruined equivalents represented a world that had vanished entirely.

one of the earliest attempts to make extensive visual records of castles was Samuel and Nathaniel Buck’s survey of medieval architecture in Britain. `e prospectus was issued in 1726 and by 1742 they had recorded many of the castles in England and Wales, which appeared among over 400 designs in their series Views of Ruins of Castles & Abbeys. 1 `is pioneering venture was intended to be topographical and informative and, in that respect, it is rather unjust that it would later be criticized for its artistic limitations. `e Bucks’ presentation of these buildings is admittedly prosaic but the imperative that motivated the project was to record them before they were destroyed or altered beyond recognition. As the prospectus stated, the engravings would ‘rescue the mangled remains’ of ‘these aged & venerable edifices from the inexorable jaws of time.’2 In the second half of the eighteenth century topography was increasingly in dialogue with landscape painting which, as a genre, would develop into something that encouraged the most ambitious creative eforts. Inevitably, the topographer’s need for accurate notation became of much less significance when aesthetic criteria became the norm for judging the quality of an image. Initially, however, the tension between these two ways of approaching landscape was much less marked and Paul Sandby’s `e Eagle Tower at Caernarfon is, in that respect, a transitional work (see page 134). often regarded as the founder of the British watercolour school, Sandby’s skilled use of the medium helped demonstrate its artistic potential. At the same time, much of his work in Wales was published as a series of aquatinted topographical views in the 1770s and 1780s, including the Eagle Tower.3 Much the same balance of priorities between topography and fine art practice can be seen in `omas Hearne’s watercolour of Newark Castle (see page 135). Painted in 1777, it was engraved in Hearne’s topographical publication Antiquities of Great Britain in 1796. Hearne produced several versions of the subject and a larger version of this composition was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1793.

`e dialogue in works like these between artistic and topographical understandings was challenged by more resolutely aesthetic approaches. `e Revd William Gilpin was the chief theorist of the Picturesque movement, publishing a number of books in the last quarter of the eighteenth century on the appreciation of landscape and championing an aesthetic that lay between the sublime and the beautiful. Gilpin celebrated visual variety, broken forms and intricacy, and for that reason he preferred his castles, real or imagined, to be ravaged. For example, he considered that Raglan ‘owes its present picturesque form to Cromwell; who laid his iron hands upon it; and shattered it into ruin.’4 But there were limits. As he noted at Brecknock, for a castle to be appreciated, to be still ‘a ruin of dignity,’ some sense of what it had once been needed to remain visible. He went on,

In many places indeed these works are too much ruined, even for picturesque use. Yet, ruined as they are, as far as they go, they are very amusing. `e arts of modern fortification are ill calculated for the purposes of landscape. `e angular and formal works of Vauban, and Cohorn, when it comes to their turn to be superseded by works of superior invention, will make a poor figure in the annals of picturesque

`omas Rowlandson / Dr Syntax Tumbling into the Water © The British Library Board (cup.410.g.425, opposite page 71)

beauty. No eye will ever be delighted with their ruins: while not the least fragment of a British or a Norman castle exists, that is not surveyed with delight.5

Gilpin’s approach was doctrinaire, prioritizing landscapes that worked as pictorial compositions. Needless to say, his unrelenting elevation of aesthetic responses was vulnerable to satire. In `e Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, William Combe made fun of it, even paraphrasing Gilpin’s remarks.6 `e eponymous and hapless hero of Combe’s poem hears how a violent thunderstorm has ruined the possessions of the villagers in whose inn he is lodging. Indiferent to their loss, he learns from his innkeeper that something of much more interest to him has also been struck by lightning.

‘`e castle by the river side; A famous place, where, as folks say, Some great king liv’d in former day: But this fine building long has been A sad and ruinated scene, Where owls, and bats, and starlings dwell,And where, alas, as people tell, At the dark hour when midnight reigns, Ghosts walk, all arm’d, and rattle chains.’ ‘Peace, peace,’ said Syntax, ‘peace my friend, Nor to such tales attention lend. – But this new thought I must pursue: A castle, and a ruin too; I’ll hasten there, and take a view.’ 7

Combe’s choice of a castle as a focus for Syntax’s obsessions is thoroughly appropriate, given how often Gilpin described castles in picturesque terms. Moreover, Syntax’s behaviour is shown to be blinkered, elevating visual appeal over social and historical understandings. But his aesthetic strait jacket is his undoing; in his search for the best composed view of the ruins he slips and tumbles into the river.

`e concentration of the picturesque on the purely visual was qualified by others who insisted that the mind’s response to the world necessarily involved a wider register. one of these was Archibald Alison whose Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) argued that aesthetic reactions were not merely responses to formal features but were prompted by the beholder’s state of mind and its train of memories. In short, the historical associations of a place could afect the beholder as profoundly as its observable features. With respect to castles, in particular, Alison declared

`e Sublimest of all the Mechanical Arts is Architecture, principally from the durableness of its productions; and these productions are in themselves Sublime, in proportion to their Antiquity, or to the extent of their Duration. `e Gothic Castle is still more sublime than all, because, besides the desolation of Time, it seems also to have withstood the assaults of War.8

To include a castle in a work of art was therefore to engage with the past, whether that be by invoking some of the historical events associated with the building, or simply by responding to the depredations of time as medieval masonry slowly succumbed to the elements. From Alison’s point of view, anyone looking at, say, Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s painting of Carisbrooke Castle (1787), with a diminutive figure approaching the massive towers of the gateway, would have had their appreciation

Alison’s thoughts on the sublime should also be considered. He uses it in the context of the durability of castles, capable of resisting assaults from war and time itself. In the mideighteenth century Edmund Burke had characterized the sublime as ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,’ associating it with phenomena which ordinarily would occasion terror but which could be made agreeable once the actual danger was removed.9 Alison’s usage shows how by the century’s end the word sublime had become a catch-all term that stood for exceptional phenomena of various kinds. In the visual arts it was principally associated with the exaggerated efects of rugged terrain, wild weather, soaring height and vertiginous depth that many artists had made their own. Girtin’s watercolour of Bamburgh Castle is a good example of that tendency (see page 139). `e shattered ruins cling to a rock high above the sea, the drop made apparent by the seagulls floating in the air, and the viewer is invited to imagine the precarious ascent up the stone staircase on the right as threatening storm clouds mass above.

Girtin’s contemporary, J.M.W. Turner, also found creative stimulus in castle subjects. Castles were a feature of the first oils and watercolours he exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1790s, all of them derived from trips he had made to the north east of England and to Wales. `ereafter the majority of his depictions of castles, over 100 of them, were painted in watercolours alone, most of them commissioned to be engraved in the various topographical series to which he contributed. `e most important of these for castle subjects was Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1827–38), over a third of whose designs contain them. Ten of the eighteen engravings in `e Rivers of England (1823–27) also include castles. Turner’s watercolour of Norham Castle on the Tweed was one of the first to be engraved in that series (see page 138). He had first visited the castle in 1797 and it was a recurring feature throughout his career from his first watercolour of it in 1798 to his unfinished oil of c.1845. He had visited Rochester even earlier, in 1793, and returned to it two decades later to make studies for this watercolour, which was also engraved in `e Rivers of England (see page 70). Both watercolours show the extent to which the older topographical tradition had given ground to an approach to landscape painting that was as much concerned with colour and efects of light as it was with architectural exactitude.

As would be expected of a watercolour artist born in the late eighteenth century, John Sell Cotman depicted numerous castles in his oeuvre, beginning with one of his first exhibited works at the Royal Academy. Cotman’s architectural studies are characterized by their exactitude but, like Turner, his approach is insistent on the image’s coherence as a work of art, as opposed to its complete subordination to topographical accuracy. He visited Wales in 1800 and 1802, making drawings on the spot, but watercolours like this one of Powis Castle (see page 140) were worked up later and are striking in their use of relatively flat colour patterning to articulate the composition.

Josiah Whymper’s Richmond Castle in yorkshire (see page 73) dates from the year he was made a full member of the New Society of Painters in Water Colours. It is a good example of the development of watercolour painting at mid century, taking its cue from the experiments of Turner and his contemporaries and working proficiently in what had become a British speciality. As a romantic ruin Richmond Castle had already been the subject of numerous artistic interpretations, including works by Sandby, Girtin, Turner and Cotman. Whymper’s presentation of the castle, as a relatively distant object, maintains this tradition. In any case, a closer view might perhaps have compromised its romantic appearance, insofar as parts of the castle had recently been modernized to accommodate its new function as the headquarters of the North york Militia.

`e pressure of modernity was increasingly a factor determining attitudes towards these buildings. `e late nineteenth century saw a number of initiatives develop to protect the historic heritage of Britain, with the establishment of William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877) and the National Trust (1896) and the passing of `e Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882).10 Previous generations had regarded castles as features in a landscape, redolent of history and identity but susceptible to inevitable decay if no more adequate use could be found for them. Now they were o2cially listed as monuments to be preserved. `is new context necessarily afected their artistic treatment. Heywood Sumner’s watercolour of Badbury Rings (see page 52), in Dorset finds something of its meaning in this new respect for the monuments of the deep past. His early artistic oeuvre, from the 1880s, is associated with the Arts and Crafts movement but by the 1910s he had turned to archaeolon and this watercolour is a product of both approaches.

`e artistic presentation of castles in the modern age brings into sharp focus their increasing distance from contemporary life. `e most successful images made of them in the twentieth century were made by artists associated with the etching revival, maintaining a link with earlier representational strategies at a time when the high modernism of Cubism and other contemporary art movements seemed to propose a clear break with the past. Frederick Landseer Griggs, for example, etched numerous subjects of invented medieval buildings and towns in a deliberately nostalgic evocation of a lost world. `e Quay shows an idealized townscape in which elements of civilian, military and religious life are all visible (see page 150). `e castle on the hill is interlocked with the town it defends, asserting the integral nature of medieval society. Griggs believed strongly that the modern world was discordant and material, unlike the harmonious and spiritual culture of the middle ages. `e Quay, as with similar images by him, is essentially a rebuke to modernity.

In both technique and subject matter Philip Wilson Steer’s oil painting of Chepstow Castle (see page 69) is also deliberately traditional. Steer had abandoned his earlier quasi-Impressionist approach to modern subjects, as seen in his paintings of the 1880s and 90s, and repositioned himself as the heir to Turner and Constable. `is view, for example, is very similar to the one published by Turner in 1812 in his Liber Studiorum, a miniature edition of which Steer took with him when making sketching tours.11 Steer’s invocation of tradition is worth remarking. Artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included castles in paintings that were as advanced as anything else being produced at the time. In contrast, Steer

seems to have chosen a castle subject precisely because it was traditional. `e artistic experimentation of the early twentieth century English art world tended to focus on the modern city and its new ways of life, not on these relics of the past.

McKnight Kaufer’s poster of Bodiam Castle (1932) (see page 101) reveals how the architectural heritage of castles was increasingly associated with leisure activities. `e Shell campaign selected landmarks that typified the variety and interest to be found in the British countryside, celebrating its deep history while simultaneously demonstrating how the petrol engine made it more accessible than ever. Much of McKnight Kaufer’s poster output for Shell and other companies made brilliant use of highly innovative graphic design, but when working on this commission he adopted a more traditional presentation of the image befitting its traditional subject matter.

As war threatened later in that decade, it became clear that much of the built heritage was vulnerable to damage or destruction. `e Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime ran a scheme between 1940 and 1943 in which artists would depict those places seen as crucial to national identity. Some 97 artists contributed over 1500 works to the scheme, ‘Recording the changing face of Britain’ or, more simply, ‘Recording Britain’. It was inaugurated by Kenneth Clark, who deliberately resurrected the old topographical tradition, and promoted the use of the traditional technique of watercolour. Barbara Jones’ Pendennis Castle (1943) is a good example of the results (see page 109). `e castle, originally built by Henry viii, had been equipped with new guns for coastal defence and was for that reason vulnerable. Jones depicts the historic structure and only two details, the iron fence and the radio aerial, incorporate it in the modern world.

Although a few images of castles continued to be made after the war, as for example in John Piper’s work, the topographical tradition was efectively exhausted. `e visual interest in castles has migrated from the fine arts to cinema and television, with over 140 productions using them as sets over the last 80 years. In that context, of course, the castle’s genuine historical identity is superfluous. Alnwick Castle, for example, has been the setting for King Arthur, Mary Queen of Scots, `omas à Beckett, Ivanhoe, `e Sherif of Nottingham, Dracula, Blackadder and Harry Potter among others. Clearly, the allure of castles persists. While they may no longer feature in the works of many visual artists their popular standing remains high as places to visit and as sites for imaginative engagement.

1. In 1774 a collected set of their engravings was published in three volumes, entitled Buck’s Antiquities or Venerable Remains of Above 400 Castles, &c., in England and Wales, with near 100 Views of Cities. 2. Samuel Buck, ‘Proposals for the publication of … twenty-four views of castles … in the counties of Lincoln and Nottingham’, 1 November 1726, copy in private collection; quoted in Ralph Hyde, ‘Buck, Samuel (1696–1779)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3850, accessed 24 Nov 2016]. 3. Views in South Wales (1775), Views in North Wales (1776), Views in Wales (1777) and Twelve Views of North and South Wales (1786). 4. William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (London: R. Blamire, 1782), p. 49. 5. Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, p. 51. 6. Compare Gilpin’s comments on castle living quarters in Observations on the River Wye, p. 48 with Combe’s Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (London: Ackermann [1812], ninth edition, 1819), p. 71. Gilpin: ‘on viewing the comparative size of halls and chapels in old castles, one can hardly, at first, avoid observing, that the founders of these ancient structures supposed, a much greater number of people would meet together to feast, than to pray.’ Combe: ‘I fear our fathers took more care/of festive hall than house of prayer./I find these Barons fierce and bold,/Who proudly liv’d in days of old,/To pray’r preferr’d a sumptuous treat,/Nor went to pray when they could eat.’ 7. William Combe, Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (London: Ackermann [1812], ninth edition, 1819), p. 70. 8. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, Edinburgh: J.J.G. and G. Robinson, 1790, pp. 226–7. 9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), p. 13. 10. `e Ancient Monuments Protection Act was initially concerned only with prehistoric remains. Its scope was widened with further legislation in 1900, 1910 and 1913 that brought castles within its remit. 11. River Wye, etching and mezzotint by Turner and W. Annis, published 23 May 1812. For Steer’s use of the Liber Studiorum see D.S. MacColl, Life, work and setting of Philip Wilson Steer (London: Faber and Faber, 1945) p. 80.