In Turner’s Warkworth Castle (V. and A. Museum), exhibited in 1799, and Girtin’s Bridgnorth (British Museum), painted in 1802, we find these two streams of influence uniting. These drawings are at the same time both topographical and poetical; each represents a particular place with a good deal of accuracy, but in such a way that the drawing might just as correctly be called a poetical landscape as a topographical representation.
This combination of fact with emotion, of representation with poetry, has remained during the whole of the nineteenth century and down to the present day the dominant characteristic of British landscape painting. Sometimes the topographical factor was subdued or almost submerged, as in the water-colours of George Barret, junr. (1767-1842) and Francis Oliver Finch (1802-1862), but it is generally predominant, though always in combination with emotional or poetical expression, in the works of William Havell (1782-1857), David Cox (1783-1859), Peter De Wint (1784-1849), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), G. F. Robson (1788-1833), Samuel Prout (1783-1852), William Hunt (1790-1864), Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), David Roberts (1796-1864), J. D. Harding (1797 or 8-1863), R. P. Bonington (1802-1828), T. Shotter Boys (1803-1874), J. Scarlett Davis (1804?-1844), J. F. Lewis (1805-1876), W. J. Muller (1812-1845), William Callow (1812-1908), Birket Foster (1825-1899), A. W. Hunt (1830-1896), E. M. Wimperis (1835-1900), Tom Collier (1840-1891), and J. Buxton Knight (1842-1908).
The course of development of the subject-matter of British landscape painting in water-colour we may, therefore, say has been somewhat as follows: it started with the object of recording as clearly and accurately as was possible the appearance of buildings and places, and it did this, not for purely artistic reasons, but in the interests of antiquarian, archæological, historical, or geographical information; by the side of this place-recording activity there sprang up a series of painters who aimed at the production of landscapes as the means of artistic and emotional expression; we then find these two groups acting on each other, the poetical school teaching the topographers style, design, “atmosphere,” and emotion, and the topographers directing the attention of the poetical painters to the observation and study of nature and the expression of
PLATE II.
(In the possession of Thomas Girtin, Esq.)
“THE VALLEY OF THE AIRE.” BY THOMAS GIRTIN.
their own personal emotions; and the outcome of this process is the present school of British landscape painters in water-colours, which attempts, both in its highest and in its lowest efforts, to do full justice to the progressive demands which the educated public has thus learned to make on the artist.