Some Famous Illuminated Manuscripts

Wilson's English work of the sixties and seventies, more various than is often thought, is at its best of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction; to the English landscape he transferred something of the miraculously lucid

Roman light, in which objects in the countryside can seem to group themselves consciously into picture. On other occasions Wilson found in the

Welsh and in the English scene a ra-diant yet brooding tenderness, the placid mystery of wide stretches of water, over which the eye is drawn deep into the picture to the far Haze on the horizon where sight seems to melt.

Sometimes he also made a bid to align his compositions with the classic example of Claude by peopling them with classic or mythological figures.

The most remarkable of Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only found a full appreciation this century. These are very early landscapes, painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are not pure landscapes as they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two genres is so perfect that the pictures become portraits of more than a person - of a whole way of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally among their woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of characterization is so traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and water has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness - sometimes it is almost a thunderlight.

In his later pure landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush of a painter who loved the radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as perhaps no other English painter has ever done.

Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main peaks in eighteenth century landscape painting.

Gainsborough's LandscapesAs a landscape painter Gainsborough was influenced in his early years by Dutch seventeenth century pictures seen in East Anglia; and the landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich period portraits are all in that tradition. But during his Bath period he saw paintings by Rubens and thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape compositions. The landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity deriving from the light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid sketches from nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in his studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on and moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white chalk landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were done in the studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and some of the finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example, resulted perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil note made on the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the aid of his candle and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level he went far beyond the current formulae and achieved a degree of integrated three-dimensional arrangement.

Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers"

Probably the most lasting impression made on many people by Richard

Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" is of the golden light that suffuses the painting. It is a sort of light we associate with a warm summer evening. Actual sunlight doesn't often have such a mellow tone, but this colour accords perfectly with the image many of us hold of what evening light ideally should be. Almost everything about this painting has a similar elysian quality. None of us has seen a view exactly like this one, and yet it immediately strikes a sympathetic chord: the cattle lazing in the late sun while the herders take a swim; the softly rounded hills with masses of unruffled foliage; the quiet river meandering toward the distant mountain and the still more distant, unclouded horizon. There is even a ruined temple, picturesquely placed as a gentle reminder of the transitory character of man's achievement in the face of nature. Eve-rything about this painting contributes to this idyllic mood. It is a little too good to be true; but we wish it might be true.

Richard Wilson himself had never seen this view any more than we have, because it does not exist. It was for him, as it is for us, an ideal landscape, sensitively developed in his imagination from his recollections of things encountered, both in nature and in art. It was an attitude that was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate that produced a painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin to that which accounts for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse".

Underlying the interest in creating an "ideal" landscape was the assumption that art should aspire to something more than mere sensuous gratification; that it should elevate the thoughts of the spectator and purge his mind of petty considerations. This was to be achieved both by what was included and (equally important) the way in which it was represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm summer light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean area, and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the way in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a mood of quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the centrally placed ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter- poise in the distant mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left.

The group of bathers on the left is balanced by the cattle on the right.

The whole view is enframed by trees on either side and set comfortably back in space by a dark' foreground ledge. The sense of balance involves many factors, including shape, light, texture and distance. Nothing appears forced, but every element in the picture has been conceived and placed with regard to its relation to the whole.

7) SCIENCE AND ANIMAL PAINTING

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806)

A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby, an able enough painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London- trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed, practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the IndustrialRevolution. He saw the world in a forced and sharpening light'- sometimes artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces caught in the circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting mon-strous shadows. This was an old trick - deriving from Caravaggio and the Dutch candlelight painters - but with it Wright brought out a sense of exploration and exploitation - scientific, intellectual and commercial, the spirit of the Midlands of his time. His patrons were men like the industrialist Arkwright of the spinning Jenny, and Dr Priestley, the poetic seer of the new science (both of whom he painted).