Teachers’ Resource
EXPERIENCING
LANDSCAPE
INTRODUCTION
The Courtauld Gallery’s world-renowned collections
include Old Masters, Impressionist and PostImpressionist paintings, an outstanding prints and
drawings collection and significant holdings of medieval,
Renaissance and modern arts. The gallery is at the heart
of the Courtauld institute of Art, a specialist college
of the University of London and is housed in Somerset
House.
The Courtauld Institute of Art runs an extensive
programme of learning activities for young people,
schools, colleges and teachers. From gallery tours and
workshops to teachers’ events there are many ways for
schools and students to engage with our collection,
exhibitions and the Institute’s expertise.
The Experiencing the Landscape resource is for
teachers to learn about the history of Western
Landscape painting looking at different historical
Our teachers’ resources are based on The Courtauld’s
and social contexts across time. The resource is
art collection, exhibitions and displays. We are able to
divided into chapters covering a range of themes. The
use the expertise of our students and scholars in our
accompanying CD can be used in class or shared with
learning resources to contribute to the understanding,
your students and we hope the resource will help bring
knowledge and enjoyment of art history. The
the subject of Landscape Art, and the artists’ experience
resources are intended as a way to share research and
understanding about art, architecture and art history. We of landscape, alive for you and your students. The
resource ends with a glossary of art historical terms to
hope that the articles and images will serve as a source
of ideas and inspiration which can enrich lesson content aid your understanding.
in whatever way you, as experienced educators see fit.
Stephanie Christodoulou
PROGRAMME MANAGER
Henrietta Hine
GALLERY LEARNING
HEAD OF PUBLIC PROGRAMMES
EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE
Edited, compiled and produced by
Helen Higgins and Stephanie Christodoulou
To book a visit to the gallery or to
discuss any of the education projects at
The Courtauld Gallery please contact:
email: [email protected]
telephone: 0207 848 1058
Typeset by JWD
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Unless otherwise stated, all images
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust,
The Courtauld Gallery, London
CONTENTS
1: SOARING FLIGHT: PETER LANYON’S GLIDING PAINTINGS
2: BRIDGET RILEY: LEARNING FROM SEURAT
3: PANORAMA
4: FRANK AUERBACH: LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952-62
5: CONSTABLE CLOUDS
6: TURNER PAINTING IN THE RAIN
7: MONET AND HIS STUDIO BOAT
REGARDE! - French translation: Monet et son atelier bateau
8: CÉZANNE’S LANDSCAPES: ‘A HARMONY PARALLEL TO NATURE’
9: EARLY LANDSCAPES (1550-1650) BRUEGEL AND RUBENS
10: GLOSSARY - Terms referred to in the glossaries are marked in GREEN
11: IMAGE CD
COVER IMAGE:
Paul Cézanne
(1839-1906)
Tall Trees at the Jas de Bouffan (detail)
circa 1883
Oil on canvas
93.7 x 108.4 cm
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1: SOARING FLIGHT:
PETER LANYON’S GLIDING PAINTINGS
Helen Higgins in conversation with Dr Barnaby Wright
Curator of 20th Century Art, The Courtauld Gallery
Exhibition in Focus: 15 October 2015 – 17 January 2016
A painter’s business is to understand space…. I don’t mean the old approach to landscape
– sitting in one place and taking in the view, as you get in traditional painting. What I’m
concerned with is moving around in this space and trying to describe it. That’s one reason
I go in for fast motor-racing, cliff-climbing and gliding – gliding particularly:
I like using actual air current; I feel as if I’m getting to the root of the matter.
Peter Lanyon
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO FOCUS ON PETER
LANYON’S GLIDING PAINTINGS?
Peter Lanyon is one of the most important post-war
artists in the United Kingdom. We wanted to look
closely at the remarkable gliding paintings he produced
in the late 1950s and early 1960s because they are
extraordinary; no artist has taken to the skies and started
painting from the experience of gliding as Lanyon
did. Lanyon’s work was always rooted in landscape; his
gliding paintings are an extension of what he had been
doing previously as a landscape painter who crossed
over between landscape and abstraction (a term Lanyon
never liked).
WHAT SPARKED LANYON’S INTEREST IN FLIGHT,
AND HOW DID GLIDING INFORM HIS WORK?
Lanyon was probably interested in flying as early as
the 1930s. Severe migraines had prevented him from
becoming a pilot during the Second World War and so
he worked as a member of the Royal Air Force ground
crew. His decision to take up gliding in the late 1950s
was driven by his desire to find new ways of immersing
himself in the landscape. He had spent a long time
trying to put himself into extreme locations in Cornwall
by peering off cliff tops, and encounter extreme
moments in the landscape, such as watching the sea
crashing against the cliffs in all weathers. It was whilst
Lanyon was out walking one day, as he did very often
along a high cliff top, that he saw three gliders circling
overhead and realised that gliding was the next step he
needed to take in order to see the landscape from the
air and be freed from a land-based perspective.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE OF
GLIDING IN PREPARATION FOR THIS EXHIBITION?
I was persuaded by co-curator Toby Treves to go gliding
in order to understand Lanyon’s work better. I was
slightly sceptical at the time, but I now understand how
important it is. You immediately realise how different
gliding is from powered flight. In a glider you’re sensitive
to a remarkable range of different qualities of air. You’re
not just looking out of your window with your airline
meal on your lap; you’re looking all around, constantly
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scanning the sky. It’s essential to read and understand
the sky in order to know where a thermal is, or how far
away from a potential landing spot you are.
HAS GLIDING CHANGED YOUR
UNDERSTANDING OF LANYON’S WORK?
Knowledge or experience of gliding really enriches
your understanding of the paintings. What looks like
gestural marks or a spontaneous bit of painting actually
relates to certain characteristics of gliding experience,
be that a thermal or patch of calm air. The titles of many
of these paintings are also drawn directly from gliding
terminology, for example major works such as Thermal
(image 1), Soaring Flight (image 2), or Cross Country
(image 3). These terms come to life once you know a
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little bit about gliding. It has been a very important part
of this exhibition and the catalogue and explains why
an aerial view is not all that interesting from a glider,
but just one part of a very exciting range of different
experiences that you have whilst gliding.
ARE THERE OTHER PAINTER-PILOTS IN THE HISTORY
OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING?
Lanyon is unique in being a glider pilot who puts that
experience of gliding so directly into his art. There are
other artists who have flown and used their experience
of flying, such as the Futurists, as well as artists who
had been involved in flying during each of the wars; for
example C.R.W. Nevinson who painted the experience
of flight in World War One. These artists tend to be
more interested in aerial views or of images of an
aeroplane in the sky.
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT LANYON’S
RELATIONSHIP TO LANDSCAPE AND HIS
PARTICULAR CONNECTION TO THE CORNISH
LANDSCAPE?
Peter Lanyon was the only major avant-garde artist
associated with St Ives who was native to West
Cornwall. Other artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara
Hepworth and Patrick Heron had been drawn to the
St Ives landscape from elsewhere in the country but for
Lanyon it was where he grew up. It was a landscape he
knew intimately and had a deep connection with. For
most of his mature career as an artist Lanyon immersed
himself as deeply as possible in the rough and rugged
coastal landscape of the Penwith Peninsular, searching
for a language of painting to express that experience.
When Lanyon started gliding at the end of the 1950s
his paintings had become quite close to abstraction,
yet they remained rooted in experience of a specific
landscape; for example the mining town of St Just,
which he knew very well and whose history and people
were imbedded in his work in various ways; or in terms
of his experience of the weather in that area. Lanyon’s
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work is always very closely rooted in a specific landscape Abstract Expressionism, but rather than just being an
expression of one’s inner feelings or psychological state,
and therefore never fully abstract.
or just through chance and action painting, for Lanyon
HOW DID GLIDING CHANGE LANYON’S
they are inextricably linked to particular experiences of
UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE AND THE
the landscape. In his later paintings Lanyon was a more
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAND, SEA AND AIR?
experienced glider pilot and no longer felt the novelty
Lanyon became aware that depicting the landscape
and rawness of the bang of flying into a thermal, or the
from a single fixed-point perspective didn’t provide an
anxiety that comes with landing in a farmer’s field. The
authentic human experience of the landscape. During
paintings therefore became slightly calmer and the
the 1950s he sought to find new ways to express the
mark-making he employs to convey those experiences
landscape that weren’t rooted on the spot. Gliding
are much less hectic or full of attack. Lanyon develops
extended that very radically because his experience
a different language of painting to reflect a more
through gliding (and the way he painted it) wasn’t
developed experience of gliding.
specifically about aerial views. Lanyon sought to collapse
and explore different perspectives as he travelled over
DID LANYON MAKE SKETCHES IN PREPARATION
the land and express the ways different qualities of air
FOR HIS GLIDING PAINTINGS?
feel in a glider. Space therefore became more fluid, and Lanyon tends to work on the canvas or board straight
the idea of movement through the landscape became
away with some idea of what he wants to express. In the
increasingly central to his gliding paintings.
first part of the gliding pictures, he would paint and then
scrape back through several layers to reveal a vibrant
colour that transforms the composition. For Lanyon
HOW DID GLIDING INFLUENCE LANYON’S
the experience and act of painting as a journey can
APPROACH TO PAINTING?
be likened to the journey of the gliding path, and our
In the early paintings (around 1959 to 1961) Lanyon
experience of moving through life.
deployed and extended an already well-developed
range of mark-making that he had been exploring
throughout the early 1950s. He used those marks in
numerous complex ways to express air currents and
convey a sense of depth and movement. The vocabulary
he developed undoubtedly had some relationship to
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IN WHAT WAY DID BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS
JOHN CONSTABLE AND J.M.W TURNER INFLUENCE
LANYON’S WORK? HOW DID HE EXTEND THEIR
INVESTIGATIONS?
Lanyon saw himself as coming from the twentieth
century English landscape tradition and viewed John
Constable and J.M.W Turner as ‘hero painters’.
The story of Turner tying himself to the mast of a boat
in order to experience the weather in all its fury must
have resonated with Lanyon’s interest in taking to the
sky to experience the elemental force of nature, as did
John Constable’s meticulous recording of the weather
conditions in his series of cloud studies. Whilst Lanyon
drew on both artists’ exploration of landscape in order
to extend what they were doing within a language of
twentieth century painting, he also strove to develop his
own experience of landscape in a way that Constable
and Turner didn’t. Lanyon sought a deeper engagement
and immersion in the landscape; rather than painting
a landscape from a fixed perspective and capturing
atmospheric effects, he tried to express something of
the movement through the landscape and of its deeper
history and culture.
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HOW DID THE WORK OF FRENCH ARTIST PAUL
CÉZANNE INFLUENCE LANYON’S WORK?
Lanyon’s interest in Paul Cézanne continued throughout
his career and in 1938 he spent the summer in Cézanne’s
home landscape of Aix-en-Provence. For Lanyon,
developing a language of painting went hand in hand
with experiencing the landscape and trying to refresh
and reinvent as he went along; he wasn’t interested in
following prescribed rules of painting. Cézanne’s way of
painting the landscape - of taking it apart and putting
it back together - resonated strongly with Lanyon.
Cézanne’s deep connection with Aix-en-Provence can
be seen in parallel to Lanyon’s deep engagement with
Cornwall; both artists shared an existential link to the
landscape of their childhood.
WHAT ABOUT LANDSCAPE TODAY? IS PETER
LANYON ‘OUR LAST LANDSCAPE PAINTER’?
At the time Lanyon started his gliding paintings in
1959, critic and curator Lawrence Alloway warned that
he might be ‘our last landscape painter’. Alloway felt
that Lanyon’s landscapes had real vitality for the future,
however there were other artists who also reinvented
the landscape at that time, such as Frank Auerbach, and
Leon Kosoff, who were treating the urban landscape
in radical and new ways. Landscape has continued to
feature in the late twentieth century with other artists
who have imbedded their experiential engagement
with the landscape within their art, such as British artist
Richard Long (image 4). Although Long’s work is very
different from Lanyon, in many ways it is connected;
the markings in landscape which are the trace of Long’s
engagement with it, and his extreme immersion in
terms of the very lengthy walks he undertakes to remote
places – this speaks to Lanyon’s desire to engage.
Sadly Lanyon’s remarkable project was cut short by his
unexpected death in August 1964 whilst recovering from
injuries sustained in a gliding accident.
IMAGE 1:
Peter Lanyon
Thermal
1960
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 152.4
© Tate, London 2014
IMAGE 2:
Peter Lanyon
Soaring Flight
1960
Oil on canvas152.4 x 152.4cm
Arts Council Collection,
Southbank Centre, London
© Sheila Lanyon
IMAGE 3:
Peter Lanyon
Cross Country 1960
Oil on panel
180 x 216 cm
Private Collection.
© Modern Art Press
IMAGE 4:
Richard Long (b.1945)
A Line Made By Walking
1967
Black and white photograph
(silver gelatin print) on board
32 x 37.5 cm
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2: BRIDGET RILEY:
LEARNING FROM SEURAT
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In a way, the fact that my copy of The Bridge at Courbevoie still hangs in my studio, all these
years later, tells you all you need to know about my feelings for Georges Seurat.
Bridget Riley
In 1959 British artist Bridget Riley (b.1931) painted a
copy of one of the highlights of The Courtauld Gallery’s
Collection, The Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-87) by the
French Post-impressionist artist Georges Seurat
(image 1). Seurat painted his view of the Seine at
Courbevoie near Paris using the innovative pointillist
technique he had created. Riley wanted to understand
Seurat’s remarkable method, in which dots of pure
colour are juxtaposed on the canvas to produce a
powerful visual experience. Riley had graduated four
years earlier from the Royal College of Art in London,
and was trying to find her voice as an artist; as well as
struggling with colour and pictorial space, she was
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“struggling to make [her] own work come alive.” Using
a reproduction from a book, Riley worked intensively
on her vision of the painting, “looking, learning,
internalizing, applying”, as she put it.
SEURAT: COLOUR AND PERCEPTION
Riley noticed that in contrast to the Impressionists,
who sought to capture the shifting luminosity and
atmosphere of the landscape in front of them, Seurat’s
interest lay in creating light intrinsically. While Seurat
certainly sketched outdoors, often painting with oils
on small, portable boards (several of these are held
in The Courtauld Collection), his large-scale works
were carefully composed in the studio and grounded
in three key principles; tone, line and colour. Seurat
was fascinated by contemporary developments in
optical theory. He sought a systematic approach to the
rendering of light and colour, which he described as
‘ma methode’. Seurat was keen to render the different
effects that natural and artificial light had on colour
in the composition. His application of paint in minute
touches of pure colour, stemmed from contemporary
experiments on the way colours were perceived by
the human eye. Instead of blending the colours on the
palette or canvas itself the painter juxtaposed dots,
which – when viewed from a certain distance – mixed in
the beholder’s eye. This phenomenon, called ‘optical
mixture’ or ‘optical fusion’, was believed to confer a
greater vibrancy to the motif and surface of the works.
Seurat’s approach, however, remains highly theoretical
and, while Riley had been able to examine Seurat’s
Bathers very closely in the National Gallery, London,
she felt that she could only understand Seurat by
experiencing his process for herself.
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COPYING FROM SEURAT
As Riley observed,
“copying Seurat helped me understand pictorial
thinking. His idea of putting impressionist painting
on a scientific or methodical footing struck an echo
with my own needs. I looked at his work, analysed it
in my copy and adapted it for my means.”
Copying the works of Old Masters has a long tradition in
the history of art as a key didactic tool in the training of
young artists in the academy system. Riley chose to learn
from Seurat at a time when this approach was no longer
prominent in contemporary art education. Yet rather
than slavishly reproducing the painting or adopting
Seurat’s methods as her own, Riley’s mission was more
ambitious; she was interested in discovering how Seurat
had answered the same fundamental questions that
troubled her; how had he approached painting? How
had he, at the most practical level, applied paint to
canvas; in what order; what aim? She drew upon Seurat’s
method to capture the shimmer of the rolling Italian
hills outside Siena as the scorching heat dissolves their
outlines in her Pink Landscape of 1960 (image 2). From
this, Riley then created created her first black and white
abstract paintings in the early 1960s – their repeated
geometric forms, a transformation of his marks. Riley
then reintroduced colour with her stripe paintings
(image 3), radically extending Seurat’s approach to
create works that heighten our perception of colour
and space. This experience represented a significant
breakthrough for Riley, offering her a new understanding
of colour and perception. The lessons Riley learned from
Seurat emboldened her to strike out into the realm of
pure abstraction and over the following few years she
produced the first major abstract paintings based upon
repeated geometric shapes, stripes and curves for which
she is today famed.
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IMAGE 1:
Georges Seurat
(1859-1891)
Bridge at Courbevoie
1886-87
Oil on canvas
46.4 x 55.3cm
IMAGE 2:
Bridget Riley
Pink Landscape
1960
101.5 x 101.5
Private Collection
IMAGE 3:
Bridget Riley
Late Morning I
1967
Acrylic on linen
227.3 x 227.3 cm
Private Collection
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3: PANORAMA
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
26 September 2015 - 10 January 2016
Even before the age of powered flight, artists
have used lofty, sometimes imagined viewpoints to
create sweeping overviews of landscapes and cities.
Their origins can be located in the sixteenth-century
Netherlandish ‘world landscape’ – a composite view
that gives the impression of encompassing the rich
variety of the earth’s topography, from mountains and
plains, lakes and rivers, to forests, castles and towns.
Multiple viewpoints of the ‘world landscape’ have
remained a defining characteristic of panoramic
landscape, whether the vistas they depict are purely
imaginary or are inspired by real places that artists
observed, whether on their travels or at home. Whilst
in the service of Emperor Rudolf II, for example, artist
Roelandt Savery travelled extensively in the mountains
of central Europe, drawing landscapes from nature.
Although in his Mountain Landscape of 1607 (image 1)
he represented a real locale, the drawing is closely tied
to the tradition of the ‘world landscape’, with its varied
topography and multiple viewpoints.
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The elevated bird’s-eye view perspective of the
panorama, suited to expressing Romantic notions of
the sublime and the awe-inspiring power of nature seen in John Irthington ‘Warwick’ Smith’s The Valley of
Terni (1770s) (image 2) - could also serve to convey civic
pride or political power, making the format particularly
appropriate for views of cities and civic pageantry as
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well as maps of battle and conquest. In contrast,
Stefano della Bella’s The Siege of Saint Omer (1638)
(image 3) maps the Franco-Flemish town’s besiegement
for nearly two months during the Thirty Years’ War in
1638. Since the siege took place before della Bella’s
arrival in France, the artist must have worked from a map
supplied by someone else.
A long, narrow format which suggests a 360° view
has from the beginning been typical of panoramas,
although some artists also found ways to capture an
illusion of immensity on sheets of more modest size.
Francis Towne’s Forest of Radnor (1810) (image 4), a
medieval Welsh hunting ground, is rendered with his
typically restricted palette of greys, greens and blues.
His delineation of form verges on abstraction, with fine
detail replaced by planes of carefully modulated colour.
The long narrow format results from Towne joining two
sheets of a sketchbook, a technique he frequently used
late in life to create sweeping panoramic views.
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IMAGE 1:
Roelandt Savery
Mountain Landscape
1607
Chalk (red and black)
on paper
20.2 x 28.9 cm
IMAGE 2:
John Irthington
‘Warwick’ Smith
The Valley of Terni
1770s
Watercolour
30.8 x 23.5 cm
IMAGE 3:
Stefano della Bella
The Siege of Saint Omer
1638
Etching
37.8 x 46.8 cm
IMAGE 4:
Francis Towne
The Forest of Radnor
1810
Watercolour, bodycolour, grey ink washes
and pen over graphite on paper
17.1 x 50.6 cm
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4: FRANK AUERBACH:
LONDON BUILDING SITES 1952-62
Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962)
(image 1) is a major new addition to The Courtauld
Gallery collection, and the last of an extraordinary group
of paintings produced by one of Britain’s greatest living
artists, Frank Auerbach (born 1931) of different building
sites he observed as London was rebuilt in the aftermath
of the Second World War.
POST WAR LONDON
The incomprehensible and unprecedented
experience of seeing London ruined by war, and
further dismembered across its building sites prior to
reconstruction, made a profound impact upon Frank
Auerbach’s artistic development.
Auerbach reworked the painting over many months,
the paint accruing to an extraordinary thickness.
Auerbach’s epic struggle with paint is palpable and
offers an equivalent to the frenetic scene he witnessed
of the Empire Cinema’s interior being gutted prior to
reconstruction. For Auerbach, hungry to prove himself
as a modern painter, the building sites
of London made
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EDUCATION PROJECT: BUILDING BLOCKS
In 2010, National Diploma art and design students
from BSIX Sixth Form College in Hackney took part in
an education project with the Courtauld Gallery Public
Programmes team and produced a hugely successful
exhibition of works in response to the The Courtauld
Gallery’s exhibition, FRANK AUERBACH: LONDON
BUILDING SITES 1952-62.
the most compelling of contemporary subjects.
As he recalled,
“London after the War was a marvellous landscape
with precipice and mountains and crags, full
of drama... and it seemed mad to waste the
opportunity and not to take notice of the fact that
there were these marvellous images... all around…
the London I knew and saw hadn’t really been
painted…it was a new phenomenon”.
There was, Auerbach says,
“a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city...
and a sort of curious freedom... I remember a feeling
of camaraderie among the people in the street”.
For Auerbach, the sense of survival must have seemed
particularly profound. He had been sent to England from
his home city, Berlin, shortly before his eighth birthday
and the outbreak of war. Both of his Jewish parents were
killed in the concentration camps and Auerbach made
London his new home.
Having made several visits to the exhibition, the BSIX
students visited major building sites across London,
including the Shard building site, located near London
Bridge, and the Olympic site in Newham. Students
produced sketches and gathered source material as
Auerbach would have done over 50 years ago (image 2).
Over a period of six weeks the students then produced
various art works including those displayed in their
exhibition, taking inspiration from the sites they visited
and aspects of Auerbach’s creative process, such as the
working and re-working of an image to build up layers of
information. The accompanying exhibition was curated
by the BSIX students, who wrote their own text labels
and press release.
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SKETCHING LONDON BUILDING SITES
Auerbach combed the city, filling his sketchbooks with
details of particular sites, capturing the activities of
workmen and machinery as they reshaped London’s
bombsites into new structures. For Auerbach the
excitement of this unknown phenomenon of London
was mixed with anxiety and fear of the sites themselves:
he recalls how he would enter a site,
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“by inching along the planks, out over the
excavation, just clinging on and dodging the
wheelbarrows”.
It was the early stages of a construction site that
most excited Auerbach, before the building had fully
emerged from the ground and there was still a sense
of struggle between the formlessness of the raw earth
being excavated and the beginnings of architectural
order. What drove Auerbach to confront his fears
was the challenge of finding a new artistic language
with which adequately to express this unprecedented
subject. It was during this period that Auerbach
emerged alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud as
part of a powerful new generation of British painters.
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IMAGE 1
Frank Helmuth Auerbach (b.1931)
Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square
1962
Oil on canvas
152.4 x 172.5 cm
Copyright: © Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of
Inheritance Tax and allocated to The Samuel Courtauld Trust,
The Courtauld Gallery in 2015. Copyright Frank Auerbach.
IMAGES 2, 3+4
Education Project - Auerbach
2010
Olympic Site
Sketchbook work
BSIX sketching in the
Frank Auerbach exhibition
at The Courtauld Gallery
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5: CONSTABLE’S CLOUDS
Dr Rachel Sloan
Assistant Curator of Works on Paper
The Courtauld Institute of Art
I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that
among the rest.
John Constable to Archdeacon John Fisher, letter of 23 October 1821
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3
The sky and the ever-changing nature of clouds was one
of the overriding preoccupations of John Constable’s
art. He first began to study clouds in oil sketches around
1810, and his interest blossomed over the following
two decades, with his first pure cloud studies made
in chalk on blue paper in 1819. His best-known cloud
studies date from the summers and autumns of 18201823. During this period he rented a house for his family
near Hampstead Heath in London and there undertook
several sustained campaigns of cloud studies, usually
noting the date, time and weather conditions on the
versos. This study (image 1), one of two he undertook
the same day within less than two hours of each other,
shows three banks of cumulus clouds being blown
across the sky from left to right by the east wind, as
indicated by the inscription. Although he evidently
worked quickly, aided by the use of thin, fluid paint, he
was unable to capture every detail as the clouds passed.
In this case, he was able to block in the blue band of
cloud in the middle ground but did not have time to
finish it before it passed.
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Constable’s meticulous recording of the weather
conditions on his studies was probably inspired by the
rapidly growing contemporary interest in meteorology;
like many of his peers, he had read Luke Howard’s
landmark Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803).
However, his interest in clouds went far beyond the
purely scientific.
In a famous letter to his closest friend, John Fisher,
written in 1821, he declared,
‘Skies must and always shall with me make an
effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult
to name a class of Landscape in which the sky is not
the “key note”, the standard of “Scale” and the
chief “Organ of Sentiment”…The sky is the source
of light in nature – and governs every thing.’
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In Constable’s view of nature, a scientific interest in
physical processes and particularities and a belief that
landscape could serve to express human emotion and
the presence of the divine were inextricably bound up
with each other.
Constable’s cloud studies continue to inspire us today
– and not only painters. Two summers ago, I decided
to make some cloud studies with my camera from
Hampstead Heath (images 4 + 5). I followed his advice
that the best clouds are to be seen in July and August,
and made note of the time, weather conditions and
location just as he did “1.15-1.30 pm, warm and windy,
on the southwest corner of the Heath near Hampstead
Ponds”.
Although the click of a shutter is of course much
faster than a hand and brush, I added an element of
unpredictability to my own cloud studies by using
slide film – cross-processed, the colours emerge in
unexpected ways that echo the unpredictability of the
movement and forms of the clouds.
IMAGE 1:
John Constable (1776-1837)
Cloud Study
21 September 1822
Oil paint on paper
30.5 x 49 cm
IMAGE 2 + 3:
John Constable (1776-1837)
Cloud study
(after Alexander Cozens’
‘Engravings of Skies’)
circa 1822-23
Graphite on paper
9.4 cm x 11.5 cm
IMAGE 4 + 5:
Rachel Soan
Photographs Clouds
Hamstead Heath
01 August 2013
Photograph
14
6: TURNER PAINTING IN THE RAIN
Dr Rachel Sloan
Assistant Curator of Works on Paper
The Courtauld Institute of Art
1
Turner was a compulsive observer and recorder of the
world around him, telling an acquaintance late in life
that even as a boy, ‘I used to lie for hours on my back
watching the skies, and then go home and paint them,’
and he filled numerous sketchbooks over the course
of his long career. Many of the sketches he made in
the open air, whether on his travels on the Continent
or in more familiar territory, served as the basis of oil
paintings and watercolours which he later worked up
in his studio, but countless others are unconnected to
finished works. Examples of his continual fascination
with the ever-changing sea and weather and his endless
exploration of ways to capture fleeting atmospheric
effects, they look as fresh and lively today as they must
have done when just made – and, in this case, still
rain-splashed.
JMW Turner famously claimed, in the lengthy appendix
to the title of his painting Snow Storm: Steam Boat off
a Harbour’s Mouth (1842, Tate), that he had witnessed
the storm he depicted while lashed to the mast of a
ship for four hours. There can hardly be a more vivid
illustration of an artist’s dedication to capturing nature
at its most dramatic. Unfortunately, although the
anecdote has been repeated countless times over the
last two centuries and was immortalised in Mike Leigh’s
2014 film, Mr Turner – we have no solid evidence that it
actually occurred.
However, we have ample evidence of Turner’s devotion
to the practice of working out of doors in all weathers,
sometimes, thrillingly, provided by his drawings and
watercolours themselves. A Boat on a Rough Sea
dates from around 1840 (image 2), a period in which he
made a large number of marine watercolours, many of
them inspired by his visits to Margate. He used a grey
paper whose tone immediately establishes a stormy
atmosphere, with menacing clouds laid in with thin
washes of colour. The boat, tossed by the waves, is
described with a minimum of lines which emphasise its
fragility in the face of the elements; the three vertical
red lines to its right may be either another boat being
engulfed by the waves or the remains of a wreck.
Turner’s depiction of the sea is even more summary:
rapidly applied touches of white gouache over mostly
bare paper, the sheet splashed by droplets of water
whose outlines are still visible more than a hundred
and fifty years after they fell and dried. The droplets are
most likely raindrops, indicating that Turner began the
sketch out of doors and was interrupted by the start of a
shower.
15
IMAGE 1:
Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775-1851)
Storm on Margate Sands
circa 1835-40
Graphite, watercolour, bodycolour (white and blue) on paper
22.5 cm X 29.5 cm
IMAGE 2:
Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775-1851)
A Boat on a Rough Sea
(detail)
circa 1840
Watercolour, bodycolour (white) on paper (light grey)
17.8 cm X 12.8 cm
2
16
7: MONET AND HIS STUDIO BOAT
Alice Odin
While living in Argenteuil in the early 1870s, French
artist Claude Monet purchased a small boat, which he
equipped to use as a floating studio on the river Seine.
Although the boat was moored most of the time and
was seldom used to navigate the river, Monet worked
extensively from it to get a view from the water. Having
spent his childhood near the harbour town of Le Havre,
Monet loved water.
The studio boat provided Monet with the perfect refuge
for him to be close to water and helped him escape
the growing industrialisation of Argenteuil, which was
quickly changing the town’s features. In it, Monet was
able to ‘float along with quiet backwaters’1 and ‘work in
peace, rowing himself about the eddies and streams of
the river in search of new motifs’2 . The gentle lulling of
the river (the river Seine is at this particular location very
gentle), the lower viewpoint and the overall atmosphere
of this peculiar studio helped Monet connect deeply
with his surroundings. Inside his boat, Monet could
be ‘completely alone, contemplating the beauties
of undisturbed nature’3. Monet painted a few works
depicting the boat studio itself: in The Studio Boat,
(image 1) at the Barnes Foundation, we can even catch
a glimpse of the painter himself in his boat. The overall
grey and green palette of this painting emphasizes the
peace and the gentleness of his experience, while also
depicting truthfully the climate and the weather of this
semi-rural area north of Paris.
Monet’s artistic experimentations with the studio boat
permeated many of his other works of the mid-1870s.
The Courtauld Gallery’s Autumn Effect at Argenteuil
painted in 1874 (image 2) is a great illustration of this.
Executed almost at water level, the composition places
the viewer right in the middle of the river, looking at
Argenteuil in the distance. Monet introduces movement
on the typical flat, static surface that is his canvas. The
river, as well as the trees, is animated slightly through
the gentle breeze that is blowing in the landscape which
Monet renders in part by scratching with the back of his
brush the trees in the right part of his painting.
1
The concept of the studio boat was not invented by
Monet. Charles-François Daubigny, another French
artist whom Monet admired and knew, also built a studio
boat in the 1850s, with which he travelled extensively to
explore the Seine and its nearby rivers. Monet’s more
static use of his studio boat reveals that his intention
to connect with the water and experiment with its
artistic depiction is more important than travelling on
it. This can be seen throughout the works that Monet
produced in the 1870s, where water is a motif he
painted repeatedly and used to experiment with his new
Impressionist technique, where his quick and vibrant
brushstrokes rendered his ‘impressions’.
1 Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 90-91
2 Douglas Skeggs, River of Light: Monet’s Impressions of the Seine,
(New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 97
3 Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 90-91.
IMAGE 1:
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
The Studio Boat
1876
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 60 cm
© 2015 The Barnes
Foundation
17
IMAGE 2:
Claude Monet
Autumn Effect at Argenteuil
1873
Oil on canvas
55 x 74.5 cm
REGARDE! - French translation:
Monet et son atelier bateau
Regarde! is a French Language resource designed to encourage stimulating content for French language lessons.
The following text is a translation of the previous chapter and talks about Monet and his studio boat.
2
Dans les années 1870, alors qu’il vivait à Argenteuil,
Claude Monet acheta un petit bateau qu’il équipa pour
utiliser comme un studio flottant sur la Seine. Bien que
le bateau restait le plus souvent amarré, et qu’il était
rarement utilisé pour naviguer sur la rivière, Monet y
travailla beaucoup pour observer la vue depuis l’eau.
Ayant passé son enfance près du Havre, Monet aimait
beaucoup l’eau.
L’atelier bateau offrit à Monet un refuge parfait près de
l’eau d’où il pouvait aussi échapper à l’industrialisation
croissante d’Argenteuil, qui changeait rapidement le
paysage de la ville. Dans son bateau, Monet pouvait ‘se
laisser flotter dans les remous tranquilles’ et ‘travailler
en paix, ramant dans les courants de la rivière en quête
de motifs nouveaux’ . Le bercement de la rivière (la
Seine est à cet endroit très calme), le point de vue
bas et l’atmosphère générale de ce studio particulier
aidaient Monet à communier avec son entourage. C’est
dans cet endroit que Monet pouvait être avec lui-même,
qu’il pouvait ‘être complètement seul à contempler les
beautés de la nature en paix’ . Monet réalisa plusieurs
toiles ayant pour sujet l’atelier bateau. Dans L’Atelier
Bateau de la Fondation Barnes, on aperçoit même le
peintre dans son bateau. La palette verte et grise de la
toile renforce le calme et la douceur de son expérience,
tout en décrivant clairement le climat et le temps de
cette région semi-rurale au nord de Paris.
Les expérimentations artistiques de Monet dans
l’atelier bateau imprégnèrent beaucoup d’autres de
ses peintures au milieu des années 1870. Autumn Effect
at Argenteuil à la galerie Courtauld, peint en 1874, en
est un bon exemple. Peinte presqu’au ras de l’eau,
la composition place le spectateur au milieu de la
rivière, regardant Argenteuil au loin. Monet introduit du
mouvement sur la surface plate et statique qu’est celle
de sa toile. La rivière et les arbres semblent légèrement
animés grâce à la brise qui souffle doucement dans le
paysage que Monet dépeint en grattant, avec le dos de
son pinceau, les arbres dans la partie droite du tableau.
Le concept de l’atelier bateau n’avait pas été inventé
par Monet. Charles-François Daubigny, un autre artiste
français que Monet admirait et connaissait, avait lui
aussi construit un bateau atelier dans les années 1850
et avec lequel il voyageait beaucoup pour explorer la
Seine et ses environs. L’utilisation plus sédentaire que
Monet fait de son atelier bateau montre son intention
d’être en contact avec l’eau et d’expérimenter avec son
interprétation artistique plutôt que de voyager dessus.
On peut le voir dans les oeuvres que Monet produit
dans les années 1870 où l’eau est un motif qu’il peint
sans cesse et qu’il utilise pour expérimenter avec sa
nouvelle technique impressionniste, dont les touches
rapides et dynamiques de peinture rendent compte de
ses ‘impressions’.
18
8: CÉZANNE’S LANDSCAPES:
‘A HARMONY PARALLEL TO NATURE’
1
Dr Charlotte de Mille
The painter must dedicate himself totally to the study of nature, and seek to produce paintings
that will be an education.
Paul Cézanne in a letter to Emile Bernard, 1904
Paul Cézanne dedicated his life as an artist to painting
his experience of the world around him. Cézanne’s
commitment to sensory perception set him apart from
the history of landscape painting as the rendering of
an illusion. It placed him close to the Impressionists,
whose focus lay in paying great attention to painting
exactly what they saw optically. In painting en plein air,
both Cézanne and the Impressionists broke from the
confines of their studios and from traditional ways of
painting. Through looking at The Courtauld’s Collection
of Cézanne landscapes, this section will outline some
of the painterly methods Cézanne developed and the
significance of his (multi-)sensory vision.
central to Cezanne’s focus on sensation; its presence is
conveyed particularly clearly through the physicality and
expressive use of the palette knife.
2
1
PAINTERLY METHODS WITH A PALETTE KNIFE
The Courtauld Institute of Art has an outstanding
collection of Cézanne landscapes covering a period
of around 30 years (1875-1905). The earliest of these
is The Etang des Soeurs, Osny, near Pontoise (1875)
(image 1). What is striking about this work is Cézanne’s
skilled use of the palette knife to apply paint in broad
swathes to the canvas, a technique associated at the
time with artist Gustave Courbet, and radical painting
against the principles established by the French
Academy. Cézanne uses thickly applied diagonal bars
of dark forest and zinging lime green to suggest light
catching the leaves of the trees. Taken from a low
view point, we are immersed as viewers in this cool
woodland: the proximity of the large tree trunk in the
right foreground and crowded trees do not give us a
traditional ‘view’, instead they accentuate our sensation
of being in nature rather than looking at nature. This was
19
PAINTERLY METHODS WITH A BRUSH
Cézanne’s painting was never formulaic. In Farm in
Normandy (circa1882) (image 2) and The Tall Trees at
the Jas de Bouffan (circa 1883) (image 3), he returned
to using brushes, but carried many of the liberating
consequences of palette knife work to his brush
technique. In these two canvases, Cézanne builds
planes through varying the direction of brushstroke.
Far from Academy painting, where brush-work was
so fine as to be near invisible, here it is one of the
dominating features. Cézanne was interested in the use
of form, colour and texture to express his response to a
3
4
landscape; his use of small parallel brushstrokes in The
Tall Trees at the Jas de Bouffan creates a shimmering
effect, as if the leaves of the trees are rustling in the
breeze. The angled brushstrokes lead the eye around
the canvas and leaves are massed into blocks of green
void of specific detail. This technique has subsequently
been coined ‘constructive brushstroke’ and indicates the
way in which Cézanne uses it as a building block to the
canvas2. Cézanne is explicit about the painterly quality
of his work, a parallel expression of his experience of the
landscape which inspired him to paint.
FAMILIAR LANDSCAPES
Like the Impressionists, Cézanne painted series of the
same place, particularly in his later years when he moved
back to his family’s area near Aix en Province. His series
of Montagne Sainte-Victoire from c. 1885-1905, of which
The Courtauld holds Montagne Sainte-Victoire with
Large Pine (c. 1887) (image 4), appear to be an obsessive
return to the expression of a place of immense
importance to the artist. We are able to capture this
through conversations remembered and published by
his friend Joachim Gasquet, who describes walking
these areas with Cézanne:
That day, we surveyed the valley of the Arc from
under a tall pine tree on the sides of a green and red
hill in the area of La Blaque […] three-quarters of an
hour from Aix and the Jas de Bouffan. The sky was
blue and fresh, an early autumn morning at the end
of summer… Before us, under the Virgilian sun, lay
Mont Sainte-Victoire – huge, delicately tinged with
blue – the undulations of the Montaiguet, the Pont
de l’Arc viaduct, houses, rustling trees and square
fields, the countryside of Aix.3
Gasquet captures the immediacy of the moment felt
and experienced. He records Cézanne commenting
whilst working on Sainte-Victoire, ‘At that moment, I am
as one with my painting. We are an iridescent chaos.’4
For Cézanne, the act of painting is inextricably
embedded in the image the artist depicts, and he
described this process as a silencing of his everyday
life in order to decipher:
‘two parallel texts: nature seen and nature felt […]
both of which must unite in order to endure […]. It
seems to me I’ll be the subjective conscience of this
landscape just as my painting will be the objective
conscience.’ 5
1 Cézanne, in a letter to Joachim Gasquet, 1897, quoted in John House,
The Courtauld Cézannes, p, 35
2 First used by Theodore Reff, 1962. See House, ibid., p.34.
3 Gasquet in Conversations with Cézanne, p.109.
4 Gasquet recalled this conversation with Cézanne in Conversations, ibid., p.114.
5 Cézanne to Gasquet, Conversations with Cézanne, p.111
IMAGE 1:
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
The Etang des Soeurs, Osny,
near Pontoise
circa 1875
Oil on canvas,
73.5 x 60 cm
IMAGE 3:
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Tall Trees at the
Jas de Bouffan
circa 1883
Oil on canvas,
93.7 x 108.4 cm
IMAGE 2:
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Farm in Normandy
circa 1882
Oil on canvas,
49.5 x 65.7 cm
IMAGE 4:
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Montagne Sainte-Victoire
with Large Pine
circa 1887
Oil on canvas,
66.8 cx 92.3 cm
20
9: EXPERIENCING EARLY LANDSCAPES
1550-1650
Camilla Pietrabissa
PhD student
The Courtauld Institute of Art
1
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
Netherlands witnessed the development of landscape
painting. Rather than simply providing a setting for
religious and mythological figures, landscape paintings
came to be viewed as independent works in their own
right. It was in Antwerp in particular that landscapes
were produced in great numbers in the workshops of
the most successful artists and sold on the European
art market. The increase in commerce and travel during
this time led to a process of urbanisation, which in
turn created a renewed longing for the peace of the
countryside. The emergence of pure landscape in the
West is therefore associated with the development
of a new sense of space. As Kenneth Clark has noted
in his essay Landscape Into Art (1949), travel and
exploration ‘enlarged the world’ of sixteenth-century
artists, resulting in the panoramic views that dominated
landscape painting not only in the Netherlands, but also
in Italy and other artistic centres.
THE PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE
– REAL OR IMAGINED?
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-69) had a particularly
original vision of landscape. More naturalistic than that
21
of his predecessors, Bruegel’s vision was partly the
result of his direct experiences of travelling through the
landscape during a trip to Italy in the 1550s in his late
twenties. The art theorist Karel Van Mander stated that
‘when [Bruegel] was in the Alps he swallowed all
those mountains and rocks which, upon returning
home, he spat out again onto canvases and panels,
so faithfully was he able, in this respect and others,
to follow Nature’.
Having crossed the Alps on his way from Antwerp to
Rome, Bruegel would have been profoundly impressed
by the views of the peaks and valleys that he later
represented in works such as The Flight into Egypt
of 1563 (image 1). Here Bruegel depicts a Northern
European landscape featuring a river valley, bordered
by craggy peaks. The landscape is so dramatic and
domineering that if it wasn’t for Mary’s red cloak we
might miss that this is a religious painting representing
the story of the Holy Family fleeing persecution in
Bethlehem. The panoramic landscape with its dramatic
birds eye view reveals the wonders of nature and
creation, which subsequently enhances the religious
narrative.
Similar panoramic views can be seen throughout
Bruegel’s oeuvre; in the only etching the artist executed
himself in 1560, a complex layering of meaning is
conveyed by the pairing of a human narrative within a
vast landscape (image 2). The scene’s compositional
formulation anticipates the Flight into Egypt, with the
action taking place in the lower right edge on a hill
overlooking a river which plunges dramatically into
the distance. A hunter takes aim at two rabbits as his
dog looks on and another hunter appears to stalk him
with a spear. The subject may illustrate a proverb: ‘He
who pursues two rabbits at once, will lose both’. Not
only does this point of view present the world in all its
remarkable variety it also invites us to place human
affairs in proper perspective.
IMAGINARY VIEWS AND ARTISTIC EXCHANGE
Partly inspired by his own drawings of Italian panoramas,
Bruegel’s landscapes also refer to imaginary views
produced by Italian painters such as Leonardo, Titian,
or Domenico Campagnola. Transnational features in
drawings and paintings of the period confirm that the
Italian journey undertaken by Netherlandish artists
led to an enthusiastic artistic exchange with Southern
artists and to the creation of a European language for
landscape.
Paul Bril (1554-1626), who moved from Antwerp to Rome
two decades after Bruegel, may be considered one of
the founders of Italianate landscape painting. In addition
to large landscape frescoes in Roman churches and
palaces, Bril left a plethora of drawings that testify to
such fruitful exchange (image 3). In a style very different
to Bruegel, this landscape scene places the viewer
within nature rather than above it. The lower vantage
point, and the use of repoussoir trees which frame the
landscape, direct the viewer towards the bridge in the
background and the ruinous castle on the top of the
rocky mountain. Despite the artist’s inscription on the
sheet indicating that the drawing was executed in Rome
in 1607, the view is most likely a fanciful creation inspired
by the picturesque landscape that was developing in
Italy at the time.
FAMILIAR LANDSCAPES
Besides celebrating God’s creation or man’s imaginative
power, artists used landscape to explore more personal
connections. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who owned
Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt and who had met Paul Bril
when living in Rome, painted landscapes mainly for
his own pleasure; we know this because very few were
commissioned by his patrons.
2
IMAGE 1:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
(ca. 1525-1569)
Landscape with the Flight into Egypt
1563
Oil on panel
55.6 x 37.1 cm
IMAGE 2:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Rabbit Hunt
1560
Etching
22.2 x 29.9 cm
22
3
In his lecture on landscape painting delivered in 1833,
John Constable noted that
‘Rubens delighted in phenomena - rainbows upon
a stormy sky, burst of sunshine, moonlight, meteors,
and impetuous torrents mingling their sound with
wind and wave.’
Rubens’ profound meditation on nature and his sense of
wonder are evident in Landscape by Moonlight (163540), where the moon is reflected in the surface of the
water and the stars are dabs of pure yellow pigment
(image 4). Rubens’ interest in the optical effects of light
is particularly evident in the last years of the artists’
life, around the time that Landscape by Moonlight was
painted.
This intensely atmospheric country wood, seen from a
short distance, pays homage to a spot familiar to the
painter; Rubens had bought the Het Steen estate, south
of Antwerp in 1635, having retired a few years before
from a hectic diplomatic career as an official emissary
of Spain. The Netherlands at this time continued to be
ravaged by war and plague, but nothing of this appears
in his landscapes. Extensive technical examination of this
painting undertaken by the Conservation Department
at The Courtauld Institute of Art has provided us with
an insight into his complex working processes. The
painting as it survives today cannot be considered a
sketch; Rubens originally conceived a smaller landscape,
then extended the panel horizontally and vertically. The
sketchiness of the brushwork dates from the second
phase, when the larger format provided a greater
freedom of handling. That Rubens had initially painted
23
and subsequently obliterated several figures in the
bottom right hand corner of the composition, leaving
a deserted landscape, is of particular interest when
considering the relationship between landscape and
narrative. Landscape by Moonlight was widely known
and greatly admired in Britain in the nineteenth century,
and it helped form the taste and style of the English
school of landscape painters, inspiring artists such as
Turner and Constable, and, in particular, the work of
the English portrait and landscape painter Thomas
Gainsborough.
IMAGE 3:
Paul Bril (1554-1626)
Rocky landscape
1607
Chalk
20.1 x 27.2cm
IMAGE 4:
Peter Paul Rubens
(1577-1640)
Landscape by Moonlight
(detail)
1635-40
Oil on panel
64x 90 cm
4
24
10: GLOSSARY OF TERMS
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:
An American post-war art movement
which was developed in New York
in the early 1940s by a small group
of loosely affiliated artists including
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning,
Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes,
Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.
The Abstract Expressionists created
a stylistically diverse body of
work that introduced radical new
directions in art - and shifted the
art world’s focus. They broke away
from accepted conventions in both
technique and subject matter, and
made monumental works that stood
as reflections of their individual
psyches. These artists valued
spontaneity and improvisation,
and they accorded the highest
importance to process; their
imagery was primarily abstract.
CROSS COUNTRY:
In gliding, the term ‘cross country’
refers to long distance flights.
Although beginners rarely leave
the vicinity of the launch site,
experienced pilots can fly for several
hours and travel hundreds of miles
if the air conditions are right. When
part of a competition, as they often
are, these cross country flights follow
a particular route staked out by
landmarks, but, whether the journey
is structured or not, judgement,
concentration and skill are essential.
ABSTRACTION:
A development in art during the
twentieth century that saw painters
rejecting subject matter and freeing
themselves from the need to
represent objects. Abstract paintings
are typically made up of shapes and
colours, without recognisable forms,
and it could be said that painting
itself is the subject in abstract art.
EARLY-MODERN:
In history, the early modern period
follows the late Middle Ages and
includes the later Renaissance era.
Although the chronological limits of
these periods are open to debate,
the timeframe is usually taken to
span from the late 15th to the late
18th centuries.
ACTION PAINTING:
A technique of painting in which
paint is splashed, dribbled, and
poured over the canvas. Its most
famous exponent was the American
painter Jackson Pollock (1912–56).
The term was first used in 1952 by
the critic Harold Rosenberg in his
affirmation of the then current belief
that a painting should reflect the
actions of its creation.
COMPOSITION:
The placement or arrangement of
visual elements in a work of art.
CRITIC:
A person who judges, interprets and
comments on something, such as
art, often presenting their viewpoint
through writing or lecturing.
25
CURATOR:
A person who is responsible for
the permanent collection and/or
temporary exhibitions of a museum
or gallery, caring for the collection,
and choosing which artworks to
hang, and how.
EN PLEIN-AIR:
Plein Air is the French for open
air. The term is used to describe
the practice of artists painting or
drawing before a landscape or other
chosen subject out of doors, rather
than in a studio or workshop.
FRENCH ACADEMY:
The French Academy was founded
in 1648 and ran its own school, the
École des Beaux-Arts (School of
Fine Arts) in Paris. The school has
a history spanning more than 350
years, training many of Europe’s
great artists. The Beaux Arts style
was modelled on the study of
classical “antiquities”.
FUTURISTS:
An artist associated with Futurism,
an artistic movement of the
early 20th century with political
implications. Futurism embraced
not only the visual arts but also
architecture, music, cinema, and
photography. Founded by the
wealthy poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti and Italian in origin, it
expressed the disappointment felt
in advanced artistic and political
circles at the apparent lack of
progress the country had made
since its unification in the mid-19th
century. The Futurists sought to
place emphasis on modernity, and
promote the virtues of technology,
machinery and speed.
IMPASTO
A painting technique that involves
a thick application of paint (usually
oil) and makes no attempt to look
smooth.
IMPRESSIONISM:
A nineteenth century art movement
that originated with a group of
Paris-based artists who chose to
break away from the traditional style
of painting taught at the Fine Art
school (École des Beaux Arts). The
name came from the title of Claude
Monet’s 1873 painting Impression,
Sunrise, shown at the first group
show in 1874. The artists involved
were interested in depicting their
impression of the world around
them, from landscapes to modern
social activity, often in a style that
was considered sketchy.
IMPRESSIONISTS:
A group of artists including Degas,
Monet, Pisarro, Renoir and Sisley
who exhibited together in Paris from
1874-1886, independently to the
Salon.
NETHERLANDISH:
A term used to describe artists
from the northern and southern
Netherlands working prior to the
Union of Utrecht in 1579. Thereafter
those from the north are usually
described as Dutch and those from
the south as Flemish.
POST-IMPRESSIONIST:
A term coined by Roger Fry in 1910
to describe the work of Cézanne,
Van Gogh and Gauguin. Literally
meaning ‘after Impressionism’,
Post-Impressionist painting uses
some of the ideas invented by
the Impressionists but moves on
significantly in terms of style, being
OLD MASTERS:
more interested in the qualities of
‘Old Master’ is a term for a European form and colour that in the accurate
painter of skill who worked before
representation of subjects.
1800, or a painting by such a painter.
REPOUSSOIR:
PATRON:
From the French repousser, ‘to push
A person who gives financial or other back’. An object, motif, or figure
support to a person. In art historical
placed in the right or left foreground
writing the term ‘patron’ is frequently of a picture to act as a framing
used to describe the person who
element which leads the spectator’s
commissioned a specific work, or
eye back into the composition.
employed an artist on a regular
basis.
SALON:
Refers to the exhibitions which took
PICTURESQUE:
place in Paris from 1667 onwards
[Derived from the Italian pittoresco,
under the auspices of the French
‘from a picture’] a term which,
Royal Academy of Painting and
when first applied to the forms of
Sculpture. The name derives from
nature, denoted an object or view
the Salon d’Apollon in the Louvre in
as worthy of being included in a
Paris where the exhibitions were first
picture. According to the early
held, usually on a biennial basis.
nineteenth century landscape
painter Uvedale Price a ‘picturesque’ THERMAL:
view should be full of variety,
A thermal is a huge bubble of rising
curious details, interesting textures,
warm air generated by differences of
and roughness and irregularity.
temperature on the earth’s surface.
Medieval ruins, country cottages,
At the thermal’s core the air rises
partly kept woodland—all motifs
smoothly, but at its periphery, where
found in profusion in the English
rising warm air meets cool sinking
countryside—were typical
air, there can be considerable
picturesque subjects and were
turbulence.
depicted by a host of landscape
painters and draughtsmen, including VERSO:
J.M.W.Turner.
Back or reverse side of a flat,
double-sided object, such as a
POINTILLIST:
drawing.
Pointillism relies on the theory
that colours intensify when
WANDERJAHRE:
juxtaposed in small dots rather than The German term for the years
being blended. In The Bridge at
following completion of an
Courbevoie (1886-87) Seurat began
apprenticeship, where maturing
by brushing broad planes of colour
artists would travel around (often on
to block in different sections. He
foot) to train with different masters.
then added a ‘skin’ of coloured
dots, carefully calibrated to create a
vibrant and harmonious visual effect.
WORKSHOP:
Artist’s place of work. The term is
also used to define the work of an
artist’s assistants or followers.
X-RADIOGRAPHY:
The process of photographing an
object using x-rays, which pass
through objects opaque to light and
are absorbed to different degrees
by different materials. The resultant
picture, an x-radiograph, is able to
show what is underneath the surface
of a painting (or indeed under the
skin when photographing a body).
26
27
GLOSSARY OF ARTISTS
BARBARA HEPWORTH
(1903-1975):
English sculptor and
draughtswoman. Hepworth trained
as a sculptor at Leeds School of
Art and at the Royal College of Art,
London, where she was associated
with other artists from Leeds,
including Henry Moore. She was
prominent amongst St Ives artists,
forming a focus in 1949 for the
establishment of the Penwith Society
of Artists with Ben Nicholson, Peter
Lanyon and others, and helping to
attract international attention to the
group’s exhibitions.
CHRISTOPHER RICHARD
WYNNE NEVINSON
(1889-1946):
British painter and engraver, studied
in London, and Paris. He shared a
studio with Modigliani and worked
with Marinetti disseminating Futurist
theories in Britain. During World
War I he joined the Red Cross, then
a medical unit. He was appointed an
official war artist in 1929. Nevinson
tended to paint the different
places he had been - landscapes
of Cornwall, avenues in New York
and the trenches in Yser. He was
influenced by Cézanne and Cubism.
BEN NICHOLSON
(1894-1982):
British painter, sculptor, engraver and
draughtsman. One of the principle
representatives of Abstraction in
British art between the First and
Second World Wars.
CLAUDE MONET
(1840-1926):
French painter was the leader of
the Impressionist movement in
France. The movement’s name,
Impressionism, is derived from his
Impression, Sunrise (1873, Paris,
Musee Marmottan). Throughout
his long career, and especially in
his series from the 1890s onwards,
Monet explored the constantly
changing quality of light and colour
in different atmospheric conditions
and at various times of the day.
BRIDGET RILEY
(born 1931):
English painter and printmaker.
One of the most important
contemporary painters to have
emerged from post-war Britain.
Riley’s work is concerned with
exploring various optical effects
and distortion of perspectives, by
means of the successive contraction
and expansion of lines or geometric
shapes and the introduction of
personal new elements, arranging
hard-edged black and white dots
or lines in regular patterns to create
disturbing effects of light and
movement.
CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY
(1817-1878):
French painter and printmaker.
Daubingy was an important figure
in the development of a naturalistic
type of landscape painting, bridging
the gap between Romantic feeling
and the more objective work of the
Impressionists.
IMAGE:
Peter Lanyon
Thermal
1960
Oil on canvas182.9 x 152.4 © Tate, London 2014
DOMENICO CAMPAGNOLA
(1484-1550):
Italian painter, engraver and
draughtsman, highly regarded by
his contemporaries. Domenico’s
drawings and prints influenced the
landscapes of Peter Paul Rubens
and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, among
others.
FRANK AUERBACH
(born 1931):
Frank Auerbach’s parents sent him
to England in 1939 to escape from
Nazi Germany. Interested in the
physical properties of painting, his
enduring technique, which is rooted
in his commitment to recreating the
essence and structure of his subjects,
is to use extremely thick impasto.
His subjects vary little, from portraits
of his models and close friends to
familiar urban landscapes in Camden
Town, London, where he has lived
and worked for 50 years.
FRANCIS TOWNE
(1739-1816):
British landscape painter and
watercolourist. Primarily a
watercolourist, Towne adopted
a technique based essentially on
patches of colour. The result is works
that often achieve great dramatic
intensity through their economy of
means and amazing colours.
GEORGES SEURAT
(1859-1891):
French painter and draughtsman.
In his short career as a mature
artist (c. 1882–91), he produced
highly sophisticated drawings and
invented the Divisionist technique
of painting known as Pointillism,
which was taken up by many of his
contemporaries associated with
Neo-Impressionism. His application
of scientific principles to painting
and his stress on the surface quality
of his work have had lasting effects
on 20th-century art.
JOHN CONSTABLE
(1776-1837):
Along with J.M.W. Turner, Constable
is recognized as the greatest English
landscape painter of the 19th
century.
JOHN ‘WARWICK’ SMITH
(1749-1831):
English topographical painter and
draughtsman. He accompanied
Lord Warwick to Italy, which earned
him his nickname. Smith and Towne
travelled together across the Alps on
their way back to England in 1781.
The strong greens and purples and
crisp pen outlines of some of Smith’s
watercolours are strongly influenced
by Towne’s style.
J.M.W. TURNER
(1775-1851):
English painter Joseph Mallard
William Turner was one of the
most original and important of all
European landscape and marine
painters.
28
LEON KOSOFF
(born 1926):
English painter and draughtsman.
Like fellow student Frank Auerbach,
Kosoff developed a method of
painting that involved the heavy
reworking of thick impasto to
attempt to provide a truthful
rendering of people and places he
knew well.
LEONARDO
(1452-1519):
Italian artist, architect, designer,
theorist, engineer and scientist.
PATRICK HERON
(1920-1999):
British painter, print maker and art
critic. Heron moved to Cornwall
during the Second World War,
before returning to London in 1945.
He was influenced by Abstract
Expressionist art and interested in
the phenomenon of colour.
PETER PAUL RUBENS
(1577-1640):
Flemish painter, draughtsman, and
diplomat; he was the most versatile
and influential Baroque artist of
northern Europe in the 17th century.
PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER
(around 1525-30-1569):
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the
first important member in a South
Netherlandish family of artists
and one of the greatest artists in
16th-century northern Europe. The
influence of his work, particularly his
allegories and landscapes (some of
which were disseminated through
engravings), was widespread and
long-lasting.
RICHARD LONG
(born 1945):
Sculptor (mixed media). Land
Art. Long’s approach to art
remains based on the fact that
he felt landscape to have been
PAUL BRIL
neglected by artists, not in terms of
(1554-1626):
representation - on the contrary, it
Painter, printmaker and
has been abundantly covered in the
draughtsman. Born in Antwerp, Bril
history of painting - but in the way
settled in Rome with his brother
it is perceived existentially in terms
Matthijs in the last quarter of the
of being a space to be crossed and
16th century. There, specializing in
the time it takes to do so. In 1967
landscapes in various media, they
he produced a piece now in The
became the most important northern Courtauld Collection, that would
landscape artists in Italy. Their art
determine the future course of his
contributed to the rapid growth of
work; in A Line Made by Walking he
landscape painting, both imaginary
photographed the transient marks
and topographical, in the 17th
left by his feet crossing the grass.
century.
STEFANO DELLA BELLA
PETER LANYON
(1610-1664):
(1918-1964):
Italian etcher and draughtsman.
English painter and sculptor born in Stefano Della Bella was an extremely
St Ives, Cornwall. Lanyon is one of
prolific artist, producing innumerable
the most important artists to emerge drawings and over 1,000 prints
in post-war Britain. He worked with
of festivals, battles, theatrical
Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo as
extravaganzas, landscapes and
part of the St Ives group.
scenes of everyday life.
29
ROELANDT SAVERY
(1576-1639):
Painter, draughtsman and etcher,
born in the Netherlands. His patron,
Rudolf II, sent Roelandt into the
Tyrol c. 1606–7 to draw ‘wonders’.
The resulting drawings, depicting
awesome mountain peaks and,
especially, waterfalls, are among
the earliest interpretations of these
thrilling natural phenomena. These
alpine views, done from nature but
enhanced in the studio, served as
reference material for later paintings.
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
(1727-1788):
English portrait and landscape
painter, draughtsman and
printmaker.
TITIAN (Vecellio, Tiziano)
(1485-1490):
Italian painter, draughtsman
and printmaker.
11: IMAGE CD
Including a list of the images
This CD is a compilation of key images
from The Courtauld Gallery’s collection
related to the theme ‘Experiencing
Landscape’.
The Power Point presentation included in
the CD aims to contextualise the images
and relate them to one another.
THE CONTENTS OF THIS CD ARE FOR
EDUCATION PURPOSES ONLY:
Please refer to the copyright statement for
reproduction rights.
IMAGE CD COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
1. The images contained on the Teaching
Resource CD are for educational purposes
only. They should never be used for
commercial or publishing purposes, be
sold or otherwise disposed of, reproduced
or exhibited in any form or manner
(including any exhibition by means of
a television broadcast or on the World
Wide Web [Internet]) without the express
permission of the copyright holder,
The Courtauld Gallery, London.
2. Images should not be manipulated,
cropped or altered.
3. The copyright in all works of art used
in this resource remains vested with The
Courtauld Gallery, London. All rights and
permissions granted by The Courtauld
Gallery and The Courtauld Institute of Art
are non-transferable to third parties unless
contractually agreed beforehand.
Please caption all our images with
‘© The Courtauld Gallery, London’.
4. Staff and students are welcome to
download and print out images, in order
to illustrate research and coursework
(such as essays and presentations).
Digital images may be stored on academic
intranet databases (private/internal
computer system).
5. As a matter of courtesy, please always
contact relevant lenders/artists for images
to be reproduced in the public domain.
For a broader use of our images (internal
short run publications or brochures for
example), you will need to contact
The Courtauld Gallery for permission.
Please contact us at: Courtauld Images,
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset
House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN.
[email protected],
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2879.
All digital images
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust,
The Courtauld Gallery, London
unless otherwise stated.
To download a pdf of this teachers
resource please visit www.courtauld.ac.uk/
publicprogrammes/onlinelearning
30
TEACHERS’ RESOURCE
EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE
First Edition
Teachers’ resources are free to teachers
and other education and learning
professionals. To be used for education
purposes only. Any redistribution or
reproduction of any materials herein is
strictly prohibited.
Stephanie Christodoulou
Programme Manager - Gallery Learning
Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House, Strand
LONDON, WC2R 0RN
0207 848 2705
[email protected]
All details correct at time of going to press