Gainsborough to Ruskin: British Landscape Drawings & Watercolors in The Morgan Library & Museum

The drawing was made during Lear's 1847 trip to Sicily, where he traveled with John Proby, who had come to Italy to study painting. Proby met Lear in Palermo at the beginning of May; the two were there again on the eve of the festival of St. Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo. St. Rosalia's body was found and brought to Palermo on 15 July 1625, and the feast is celebrated on this date each year. The double date inscribed on Lear's drawing (15. 12. July) may refer to both the day the drawing was executed and the date of the festival. In this sheet, Lear went over the pencil outlines with pen and freely brushed-on watercolor and gouache. The color notes in pencil suggest that a drawing like this would provide the artist a topographically accurate sketch that he would use to prepare more finished drawings or oil paintings.

Boys met the artist Richard Parkes Bonington (1801–1828) in Paris in 1825. It was apparently Bonington who persuaded Boys to abandon engraving and take up painting. Boys absorbed Bonington's manner of painting and his sense of color. He used touches of pure red to enliven the cool palette of this landscape.

De Wint found his greatest inspiration in England, where he traveled extensively. This quiet scene confirms his appreciation for his native countryside. Under the influence of John Varley, he worked en plein air, creating the sense of immediacy we find in the watercolor depicting the Fen district.

Fielding, a student of John Varley, was much influenced by Girtin and Turner. In his landscapes he made something of a specialty of atmospheric effects, which received high praise from Ruskin. This view of the head of Glencoe, dated 1823, was exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1824.

This portrait probably was intended for the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton, whom Ruskin had met in 1856. Writing from Brantwood on 27 December 1872, Ruskin promised Norton two self-portraits. He then recorded in his diary that he had begun work on the portrait on 28 January 1873. However, the completed drawings remained at Brantwood. The inscription on the verso is in the hand of Ruskin's cousin, Joan Severn, who, along with her husband Arthur Severn, was living with Ruskin at Brantwood; it appears that the portrait was given to her.

Ruskin learned to draw by copying the works of Samuel Prout and David Roberts and studying under Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding. Turner, however, would prove the greatest influence. Ruskin built a sizeable collection of Turner's early watercolors. The first volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters resulted from his reading a negative review of Turner's work. This drawing is a copy of the lower part of the Turner watercolor The Pass at Faido, St. Gotthard, which Ruskin commissioned. His own drawing of a detail of the Turner work is reproduced as plate 81 in the final volume of Modern Painters.

The picturesque attitude had a strong impact on the topographical artist, as seen here in Sandby's watercolor of Tutbury Castle. The artist not only exploited the picturesque love of ruins, and the rough and irregular forms, but he enhanced the rustic charm with his depiction of a herdsman and three cows.

From 1752, Sandby lived in London and Windsor with his brother, Thomas, who was involved in landscaping the duke of Cumberland's estates at Windsor Great Park. Sandby exhibited his first view of Windsor Castle in 1763, and Windsor subjects were a prominent part of his exhibited work from then on.

"Warwick" Smith lived in Italy from 1776 to 1781, where he was sponsored by the second earl of Warwick. Because of his numerous Italian subjects and the name of his patron, he was known by two nicknames: "Italian" and "Warwick." Generally the watercolors made during this time are a blend of subdued colors, usually a combination of grays and blues, tinged with pink.

Streatfeild joined the navy at the age of thirteen, attaining the rank of commander by the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As a naval officer he received instruction in draftsmanship for the purposes of preparing charts and keeping up the log book. He also would have been required to draw views of ports and fortifications for tactical purposes. About 1830 he began to travel around Europe, visiting France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. In 1842 he made a presentation album for the grand duchess Matilde of Hesse Darmstadt, composed chiefly of views around the principality. The Morgan album contains more finished views in watercolor of the same region, including two views of the park Teufelsklau ("Devil's Claw"), a view of Lichtenberg, views of Rodenstein, and one of the garden of Prinz Emil-Schloesschen.

Turner was occupied with views of castles and country houses as he traveled through England and Scotland during the 1790s . In this decade he also made his way from topographer to colorist. Here Turner's washes were applied in layers to suggest depth and atmosphere. The play of light and shadow is also impressive, the dark foreground serving to offset the castle seen in the distance, still lit by sunlight. This sheet and a companion view of the same subject were engraved by S. Rawle in 1800, and the plate was dedicated to the castle's owner, Mr. J. Fowles Luttrell, whose family had resided there since 1376.

In 1817 Turner went to the Continent, touring the battleground of Waterloo, stopping in Cologne, and traveling up the Rhine. He made a series of fifty-one views of the Rhine, including seven studies of Lurleiberg, a huge rock formation near St. Goar, named after the legendary siren who lured sailors to their doom. The Rhine, with its combination of mountain and river scenery, appealed to Turner, who was attracted to the terrifying side of nature. Here the artist blended his colors so skillfully that it is difficult to separate the rocky surface from the mists that envelop it.

Executed on a small sheet of blue paper identical to that used for drawings of the late 1820s or early 1830s, it seems likely that this leaf from a sketchbook may be from that period. In its freedom of execution it anticipates Impressionism, which was to develop in France later in the century. Intended as a color notation for the artist's own use and not as a work of art, the subject—a rainy if not stormy day on the coast—evokes Turner's personal and Romantic response to the violence of the sea.

This sheet is probably from one of Turner's sketchbooks, quite possibly from one of much the same size that he used in 1845. Both the extreme freedom with which the watercolor is applied and the color of the sky support the late dating of this work. The Goodwin Sands are off the Kentish coast opposite Deal and Walmer, and it is likely that Turner spent some time at Margate in 1845 before a short visit to France. Additional interest is provided by some lines in Turner's hand that must come from his manuscript poem "Fallacies of Hope."

William Turner was apprenticed to John Varley and elected an associate of the Old Water-Colour Society at age eighteen. In 1811 he settled in Oxford, where he lived for the rest of his life teaching drawing. His landscapes are generally open, distant views with a smooth, meticulous technique and an almost supernatural stillness.

Varley had made several sketching tours through Wales, Yorkshire, and Northumberland. During the summer months he rented a house at Twickenham and, along with his students, sketched by the bank of the Thames. His later works are more composed examples of the picturesque ideal: here figures and sheep travel along a tree-lined road dappled by sunlight and shadow.

Andrew Wyld and Evelyn Joll have suggested that this drawing, formerly attributed to David Roberts, may well be by the German-born watercolorist and engraver C. F. H. Werner. Werner spent much of his life in England, becoming a student at the Royal Academy in 1848 and participating in their exhibitions. In 1860 he went to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; in 1873 he returned to Egypt.

Although engraved by W. F. Wells and published by Wells and Laporte on 1 January 1805, this drawing actually belongs to Gainsborough's Suffolk period of the early to mid-1750s, when his subjects were chiefly woodland scenes, with pools or streams, winding tracks, and cottages nestled among trees. Withered or pollarded trees, especially the latter, which lent themselves so well to rococo treatment, were also familiar motifs.

Ruskin, who had been a student of Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, was greatly influenced by the work of Prout, Roberts, and especially Turner. These architectural studies are believed to have been done in 1848, serving as material for the artist's Seven Lamps of Architecture.

This landscape was executed in watercolor and oil and then varnished to resemble a painting. The artist began experimenting with this unusual technique in the early 1770s and exhibited a series of ten drawings at the Royal Academy in 1772. Here the blocklike ruins, whose sole raison d'être seems to be their shape and whiteness, are balanced by the thick white highlights on the vase and pedestal, horse cart, and reclining figures.

The eye is drawn from foreground to background along the curved path, and spatial depth is conveyed by means of graded washes ranging from greens and rusty ochers to pale gray-blues in the mountains.

Ruskin had planned to write and illustrate a history of the Swiss people based on the architecture of their towns. He first visited Brugg on 27 May 1858, and wrote to his father of "making a little sketch from the rocks of some houses which looked somewhat as if they might tumble into the Rhine before I got back again." This drawing was completed during a later visit to Brugg in November, 1862. The Swiss history was never realized.

This drawing is yet another example of Gainsborough's technique in wash and oil and must also date from the 1770s. The coat of varnish used to fix the drawing has yellowed, giving a golden tone to the work.

Although Gainsborough earned a living principally through portrait commissions, his landscape paintings and drawings—despite their unpopularity— figure prominently in his oeuvre. His personal preference is expressed in this often quoted remark written to a friend, "I am sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag-end of life in peace and quietness." Gainsborough most appreciated the peaceful qualities of the English countryside, and pastoral themes dominate his landscape drawings. The present sheet, made in the mid-to-late 1770s, includes such picturesque details as travelers along a riverbank and a bridge in the background. Although Gainsborough sketched directly from nature when he could, the scenes were drawn entirely from his imagination.

This brilliant chalk landscape is typical of Gainsborough's work in the early 1780s, the majority of which consists of rapid sketches of imaginary compositions done mostly as recreation. His style became increasingly sketchy, brilliant, and forceful. The Morgan's collection of twenty-five drawings by Gainsborough is of high quality, mostly coming from the Fairfax Murray collection that Pierpont Morgan bought en bloc in 1910.

For tourists in the Romantic era, Melrose Abbey had many of the same charms as Tintern Abbey as well as the additional allure of its scenic location in the Scottish Border Country. Sir Walter Scott advised visitors to view by moonlight the "broken arches" of the abbey, which provided local color in his wildly popular Border ballad The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Ruined abbeys frequently figure in the watercolors of Thomas Girtin, who made several sketching tours in this region. Although he was trained as a topographical artist, Girtin was not so much interested in architectural detail as in the spirit of the place, atmospheric effects, and interpretative touches that might evoke emotion or set a mood. Here he celebrated the bygone magnificence of Melrose Abbey while suggesting that some of its spiritual power remained on site, still a suitable locale for solitary contemplation.

This view of Tivoli is a fine example of Lear's early style of draftsmanship. Executed in 1839, two years after Lear arrived in Rome, the Panoramic View of Tivoli was made in connection with the first of the artist's seven travel books, Views in Rome and Its Environs, published in London in 1841. Although not used for any of the lithographs in the book, this sheet was included in a portfolio of extra drawings accompanying Lord Stanley of Alderly's copy, ordered on subscription. The view seems to be from the southeast, looking west toward the Villa d'Este, which is silhouetted against the hills in the right background. Below, on the lower ground, is the famous so-called Villa of Maecenas, now thought to be the Temple of Hercules Victor.

Lear left for Corsica on 8 April 1868, traveling with the writer John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), and completed his tour on 6 June 1868. By 9 May, Lear had decided to visit the great Corsican forests of Aïtone, Valdoniello, and Vico, and by the twelfth of that month he was in Valdoniello. The artist's journey was documented with illustrations in his last travel book, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, published in 1870. Lear's dramatic watercolor of Valdoniello is close to an illustration in the book and is also related to a painting in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

On 26 July 1843, Lear and his friend Charles Knight set forth on horseback on a two-week journey from Rome to Avezzano. When the friends parted, Lear spent the next few months retracing their journey on foot, stopping along the way to draw. The date for this work, 2 September 1843, places it on the artist's return trip. Lear used the drawing as the basis for a lithograph in his Illustrated Excursions in Italy (pl. 7). In his book he described Celano as "once an important fortress-town . . . [it] is now remarkable only for the extreme picturesqueness of its situation: it stands below a wondrous bare precipice on a hill overlooking the whole of the Lake of Fucino, though at a considerable distance from its edge; the space between the town and the water being filled with meadows and vineyards, and watered by the clearest of streams."

This pen and ink drawing was the design for the frontispiece of Malton's A Compleat Treatise on Perspective in Theory and Practice of 1776. The drawing has been chalked on the back and gone over with a stylus to transfer the design to an engraving plate; highly finished, it shows the flawless, uniform coverage possible with the early wash technique.

William Marlow visited France and Italy in 1765 and 1766. Like Richard Wilson and other British landscape artists, he was profoundly affected by his brief Italian experience; Italian subjects dominated his exhibited work after 1767. This delightful watercolor is probably an imaginary view inspired by his Italian travels.

Daniell traveled in India with his nephew William (1769–1837) between 1785 and 1794, recording picturesque landscape and architectural views for eventual publication. This drawing is a study for aquatint no. 15 in part I of William and Thomas Daniell's Oriental Scenery, published in London between 1795 and 1797 (subsequent parts, 6 volumes in all, with 144 color plates, were published until 1808). It was originated during the Daniells' three-year trek through northern India (1788–91) and records a view in the Hindu holy city of Gyah in the Bahar region, which the Daniells visited just five months before their return to Calcutta. Here they recorded Gyah's most sacred site, the immortal banyan tree that Hindus believe to be connected to an even more sacred tree growing in an ancient underground temple some two hundred miles away.

In 1801 Prout was employed by the antiquary John Britton to create drawings for his comprehensive Beauties of England and Wales. Through determined study, Prout overcame the problems of drawing architecture that initially had defeated him. His success is apparent in this fine drawing of Bamberg.

Marshal Louis Berthier was chief of staff for Emperor Napoleon. After the abdication he switched allegiance to the monarchy. Retired to his estate in Bamberg, he fell to death from a window.

Dayes, one of the leading topographical artists working at the end of the eighteenth century, was employed to record views for various projects. This highly finished subject is one of a number of architectural views of London made by the artist in the mid-1790s, many of which were later published in Hunter's History of London, 1811.

This is an example of Prout's exceptional topographic draftsmanship. The artist first traveled to Germany in the early 1820s; he reproduced many of his drawings as lithographs in Illustrations of the Rhine, 1824, and Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany, 1833.

Roberts is recorded as having traveled to Spain in 1832 and 1833. He arrived in Spain in early December 1832 and by early May reached Seville, where an outbreak of cholera ended his tour. On his return to England, Roberts worked to convert his sketches into paintings and finished watercolors, many of which were made into lithographs for his Picturesque Sketches in Spain.

Dibdin was a son of the dramatist Thomas Dibdin and grandson of the dramatist/composer Charles Dibdin, who was also a talented amateur painter. He is known to have exhibited landscape and architectural subjects at both the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists from 1831 to 1839. In 1848 he published a work entitled Progressive Lessons in Water Colour Painting.

Made in 1838, this drawing is a study for the lithograph General View of Karnak Looking Towards Baban-el-Molook, executed by Louis Haghe and published in volume 6, Egypt and Nubia (1849). Roberts's Holy Land was the first to present extensive pictorial views of these areas. The artist's subtle handling of watercolor and delicate white heightening effectively capture the grand yet solitary atmosphere of the ruins of the temple.

This drawing is a study for the lithograph Portico of the Temple of Edfou, Upper Egypt, that appeared in Roberts's and Brockedon's Egypt and Nubia of 1846. Roberts, who was at Edfu in 1838, made at least five drawings there. In his journal he described the scene: "Though half buried it is more beautiful than if laid open and reminds me of Piranesi's Etchings of the Forum of Rome."

This is one of the drawings Boys made on his tour of Wales in 1858 and 1859; he exclusively exhibited Welsh views at the New Water-Colour Society at this time.

The brothers Samuel and Nathaniel Buck created many drawings of architectural sites and antiquities in England and Wales, which they engraved and published. This drawing of Arundel Castle was preparatory for their engraving, which appeared as plate six in the twelfth set of The Most Remarkable Remains of Abbeys, Castles, etc to be found, published in 1737.

This fresh, intimate sheet is from a now dismembered sketchbook in which Constable recorded views of the area surrounding Reading, Newbury, Abingdon, and Oxford during a sojourn in Berkshire in June 1821. Constable made at least seven drawings of Newbury during his visit, four bearing the same date as the present sheet; two are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and another is in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.

Although this rendering of the park at Ashtead most likely dates to 1818, Cotman first visited Dr. Monro at his country house at Fetcham during the summer of 1799. In his premiere exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1800, the artist included a number of Fetcham drawings.

Cox, who had studied under John Varley in London, made regular trips to North Wales between 1844 and 1856. This view is an excellent example of the artist's control of the watercolor medium. His technique of working wet color into wet expanded the role of watercolor from tinted drawing to painting.

Cozens's debt to the French artist Claude Lorrain is evident in this idealized, Italianate landscape. The use of the large framing tree and darkened foreground are typical Claudian devices, as is the contrast of light and shadow.

Cozens made two trips to Italy in the company of two important patrons: the first in 1776 with the antiquarian and connoisseur Richard Payne Knight and the second six years later with the wealthy young eccentric William Beckford. From sketches made on these trips, Cozens produced highly finished watercolors, such as this splendid view of Rome, which probably dates to the 1790s. This watercolor is the largest of three known versions of the subject by the artist; the other two are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the British Museum, London.

In 1803 Cristall traveled to Wales in the company of Cornelius Varley, whom he had met at the drawing academy of Dr. Monro. The tour marked an important point in Cristall's evolving artistic maturity, and the works he produced at that time are remarkably varied.

This view is of the volcanic lake Llyn-y-Cau near the top of Cader Idris Mountain in North Wales. The scene had been painted several times by Richard Wilson, whose renderings adhered to the fundamentals of the Grand Style. Cristall's drawing, on the other hand, recorded his impression made quickly at the site. In this sheet he brushed on a watercolor wash of great breadth and simplicity over a summary sketch in pencil.

This watercolor, one of Danby's many views near Bristol, goes beyond mere topographical recording. It is characteristic of the quiet and peaceful mood he achieved under the influence of the Bristol Sketching Society. Danby's association with this local group of artists was crucial to his development from 1818 to 1824.

In 1838, when he was almost fifty, William Turner made his first trip to Scotland. Ruskin observed that one of his Scottish landscapes was "full of truth in its far-off Highland hills, and glowing sky, and low floating mists," very much like the present drawing.

This drawing is the first of a series of twelve watercolors executed by Blake around 1816–20 as illustrations to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, two poems by John Milton (1608–1674), the Romantics' favorite poet. Blake accompanied each watercolor with a transcription of Milton's text as well as an interpretation of the imagery.
Illustrating lines from L'Allegro, this drawing depicts the title figure of Mirth surrounded by the personifications of, among others, "Laughter holding both his sides" at center right; "Jest" and "Youthful Jollity," the boy and girl to the left and right of Mirth; and "Wreathed Smiles," the small spirits encircling Mirth's halo.

In 1838 Samuel Palmer spent several weeks at the "inexhaustible" Villa d'Este, "enchantment itself." Whereas earlier visitors had commented on the statuary and waterworks in these gardens, Palmer was most taken with the trees. "You must wonder at our staying so long in Tivoli, but you would not wonder if you saw it—I have got a finished study of pines and cypresses—the latter 300 years old and wonderfully fine." Palmer returned to England determined to paint "Poetic Landscape . . . [of] deep sentiment and deep tone," a venture highly approved of by John Ruskin, who commended Palmer's work in the third edition of Modern Painters.

Commissioned by Ruskin, this drawing was executed by Turner in 1845. The view represents the Lake of Lucerne at sunset, the golden light shimmering across the distant mountains, with the blue of the water and coast suggested by jewel-like colors. Executed in Turner's last and perhaps greatest phase, his brushwork is free, as is his use of color. His technical mastery, as well as his attempt to suggest the intangible, enabled him to achieve dazzling effects in watercolor. Despite Ruskin's praise in Modern Painters, Turner's later drawings and oils were not understood and were much criticized for their lack of form. Ruskin hung this drawing, along with several other views of lakes by Turner, in his dining room. He sold this sheet in 1865 because he could not bear to think how much Lucerne had changed over the years.