This small but delightful and enlightening exhibition on Romantic landscape painting in Britain and Germany from the 1760s to the 1840s was the first collaboration between The Courtauld Gallery in London and The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The organisers and curator (Dr Rachel Sloan, Assistant Curator of Works on Paper at the Courtauld Gallery) drew from the strengths of each institution’s collection of drawings, watercolours and oil sketches. While the Courtauld Gallery has a particularly good collection of British Romantic art, the Morgan boasts a surprising collection of superior German art from the same period. The number of exhibits (fewer than thirty prints, drawings and watercolours) was relatively small, but the quality of the works displayed and the academic content of the exhibition were exceptional. There have been several exhibitions in the recent past exploring aspects of landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape at the Royal Academy in 2012/13; see review for Criticks by John Chu), but this one stood out by making both pan-European connections with regard to subject matter and cross-continental connections between museums in Britain and the United States.
The London installation of the exhibition was located in three small top-floor rooms at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House. Visitors approached the exhibition space via the twentieth-century art collection, which incidentally formed a suitable contrast to A Dialogue with Nature. Before entering an exhibition about representing nature, visitors walked through rooms where the works on display were marked by a deliberately un-naturalistic and often non-representational use of colour and form promoted by avant-garde groups a century later. The colour scheme of A Dialogue with Nature was a, presumably deliberate, pea-green, used both as a wall colour and on the cover of the accompanying exhibition catalogue. It is the colour most associated with the English landscape and English landscape painting, and was of particular interest to John Constable, but the shade used here also provided a suitably neutral and unifying background for the works displayed.
The first room introduced the general subject and scope of the exhibition, with particular focus on the significance of political, scientific and social transformations that happened in late eighteenth-century Europe and how this impacted on the working methods and lives of artists, for example with regard to travel. These and related issues, such as industrialisation, capitalism and urbanisation, which questioned, challenged and threatened the value of land and notions of landscape and national identity, are further explored in an excellent article by Matthew Hargraves (Yale Center for British Art), which serves as an introduction to the exhibition catalogue. In this room were also introduced members of the first generation of so-called Romantic artists, such as Alexander Cozens and Thomas Gainsborough in Britain, and Johann Georg Wagner and Jakob Philipp Hackert in Germany. The display explained that many of these early representatives, although they were engaging critically and artistically with the concept of beauty in nature and landscape painting as a distinct and valuable genre, did not work en plein air. Instead they often produced landscape paintings in their studios, either entirely from memory or with the help of landscape models created in 3D on table tops, using rocks, pebbles, moss, pieces of wood and even broccoli as props, the latter representing gnarled trees. Alexander Cozens in particular explored this move away from the ‘real’ to an ‘invented’ landscape by proposing in his Essay to Facilitate the Invention of Landskips (1759) a system of creating landscape paintings based on near-abstract ink-blots randomly created by the artist. By contrast, artists such as John Robert Cozens (son of Alexander), John Constable, Franz Kobell, Johann Christian Clausen Dahl and Johann Georg von Dillis did usually work outdoors, sketching, drawing or painting actual landscapes, with Constable and von Dillis being pioneers of the rather messy art of the open-air oil sketch (collapsible oil paint tubes were not invented until the 1840s). The challenge for the visitor was to investigate whether the invented landscapes were any different in style, composition or meaning to those depicting actual settings.
This first room also introduced the differences and similarities between British and German Romantic painting, with German style notable for high realism and an almost slavish attention to detail, while British artists preferred a more open, impressionistic and painterly style. However, in the catalogue the curator also points out that both schools were committed to landscape painting as an art, with the aim of revealing a spiritual and philosophical truth beyond external appearance. They achieve this by using a number of common motifs that appear to be imbued with emotional weight and symbolism, such as blasted trees, hilly landscapes, or dramatically located man-made structures such as castles and forts. In his essay Hargraves singles out a British/German encounter between Jakob Philipp Hackert and John Robert Cozens in Naples in 1782 as symbolic of a change of course in landscape painting in both Germany and Britain, namely to ground it firmly in the direct study and observation of nature, real landscape settings and natural phenomena, albeit developing differing styles.
The very small second room formed a link between the introduction and the final section, ‘The Romantic Sublime’, and featured a few cloud studies by Constable, von Dillis and Alexander Cozens. The scientific and artistic interest in meteorology and atmospheric conditions is a crucial aspect of Romantic painting and the Sublime in art, so it was particularly good to see it included in even a small exhibition. In England Constable is best known for having produced a large number of cloud studies, with his counterpart in Germany being von Dillis, both of whom were represented here. A further study, in the form of engravings after Alexander Cozens, was displayed alongside, but regrettably this is not reproduced in the catalogue. It was particularly interesting because it bears a remarkable resemblance to the cloud illustrations found in scientific literature published after Cozens’ death in 1786, such as Luke Howard’s On the Modification of Clouds (1802), or Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena (1813). Cozens himself published his painting treatise A New Method for Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape as early as 1785, which, apart from more abstract blot-paintings, included many illustrations depicting cloud formations and skies for inclusion in a good landscape painting. It would have been hugely advantageous to see one or two of these publications displayed alongside these cloud studies, but lack of exhibition space did not perhaps allow this.
Room three formed the culmination and conclusion of the exhibition and discussed the concept of the Sublime in Romantic art. The desire to find, paint and express the spiritual dimension in nature was criticised by some contemporaries as a rejection of Enlightenment certainties, causing the German Baron von Ramdohr in 1809 to react to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Cross in the Mountains with the following words: ‘That mysticism that is now slinking in everywhere and that wafts toward us from art and science, from philosophy and religion, like a narcotic vapour.’ Despite persistent criticism, this ‘narcotic vapour’ inspired and shaped both British and German landscape painting until at least the late 1830s, with Constable famously commenting that to him Caspar David Friedrich’s work was ‘all poetry’. This concluding part of the exhibition managed to convey this complex aspect of Romantic painting by the simple means of choosing a few lesser known but hugely significant works from the collections of the Courtauld Gallery and Morgan Library & Museum. Samuel Palmer, often overlooked and still under-researched, served as the English counterpart to Caspar David Friedrich. He was represented by three works, including the outstanding ink and watercolour drawing Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park (c. 1828), in which the gnarled old oak tree assumes almost anthropomorphic qualities and is lit by a mysterious glowing light in the distance (sadly, this does not reproduce well in the catalogue, where the luminosity is lost).
Although none of the well-known Friedrich oil paintings are here, his Moonlit Landscape (before 1808 or c. 1830; the dates vary in the catalogue and on the Morgan website) from the Morgan collection is undoubtedly the star exhibit, incorporating all the elements you would expect from an early nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting. Like many other Romantic artists, Friedrich experimented with depicting moonlight, but here the moon is clearly elevated to a symbolic level and associated with Christ as the emitter of light. A solitary figure, perhaps a person, but more likely a religious statue, is juxtaposed with this divine light, placed between the familiar old and imposing trees. To enhance the effect of the moon/Christ as a source of light, the moon in this watercolour painting was actually cut out by Friedrich and replaced with a separate piece of white paper. It is possible that the painting was once displayed with a light source behind it, in the style of illuminated transparencies. Joseph Mallord William Turner is also included here with a moonlit water scene, On Lake Lucerne, Looking Towards Fluelen (c. 1841), a watercolour from the Courtauld collection. It forms a contrast to Friedrich’s detailed and almost hyper-realistic drawing, and underlines points made earlier in the exhibition about differences between German and British Romantic painting: The motifs and philosophies may be similar, but the execution is very different. Turner is not (or is no longer) concerned with detail, despite drawing ‘from nature’ and depicting real locations. He captures the fleeting effects of light on water, the grandeur and beauty of the setting, and the sublime effects of the weather.
The aim of this exhibition was to consider points of commonality as well as divergence between two distinctive schools, by means of placing the work of Romantic heavyweights, such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Caspar David Friedrich, as well as lesser known artists, together and providing highly informed exhibition texts in the form of labels, panels and an accompanying catalogue. The title of the exhibition was relevant and meaningful in several ways. ‘A dialogue with nature’ is a quote from none other than Caspar David Friedrich, who used the phrase to describe the emergence of a new visual vocabulary and attitude to landscape in painting. The quote encapsulates the intense intellectual, physical and spiritual interaction between painter and subject in the Romantic period. It also stands for the dialogue between British and German art, as well as for the collaborative nature of the organisation of this exhibition. The exhibition was expertly curated and highly educational. It made the most of a limited display area and was accompanied by a scholarly and informative exhibition catalogue, authored by Matthew Hargraves (introduction) and the exhibition curator Rachel Sloan (catalogue entries). One has every reason to look forward to further curatorial and publishing collaborations between the Courtauld Gallery and the Morgan Library & Museum.
A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany was at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from 30 January to 27 April 2014, and will be at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, from 30 May to 7 September 2014.
It is accompanied by the catalogue A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany by Matthew Hargraves and Rachel Sloan (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014).