Abstract
In The Dark Side of the Landscape John Barrell observes that the labourers in Turner’s oil painting Ploughing Up Turnips near Slough (1809)
slip between the two traditional ways of relating rustic figures to a landscape, and in doing so appear to us, not as Arcadians, nor automata, but as men. They are not in any way mere ‘objects of colour’ in the landscape; behind them looms the misty image of Windsor Castle, but nothing in the organisation of the picture encourages us to look through the figures in the foreground, to ignore them at first in favour of that sublime image behind them.l
I wish to thank Nicholas Alfrey, John Beckett and Sam Smiles for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Sheila Cooke, Clare Van Loenen and Suella Postles helped with illustrations.
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Notes
J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 153–4.
C. Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of Agricultural Landscape in England 1780–1890 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 87–9.
S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 114.
S. Smiles, J.M.W. Turner (London: Tate Publishing, 2000); E. Shanes, Turner’s Human Landscape (London: Heinemann, 1990); J. Gage, J.M.W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).
J. Ruskin, Modern Painters VolumeIVOfMountain Beauty Second edition (London: George Allen, 1898), pp. 30–1.
E. Shanes, Turner’s Picturesque Views of England and Wales 1825–1838 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 59–60.
M.H. Grant, A Dictionary of British Landscape Artists (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1952), p. 138.
If the independently wealthy Nixon could well afford to tour, probably as part of a holiday, Turner’s and Girtin’s costs of getting to a site at this time often exceeded their payment for a drawing. Turner is said to have received some travelling expenses from The Copper-Plate Magazine as well as a two guinea fee. L. Herrmann, Turner’s Prints: The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner (Oxford: Phaidon,1990), pp. 10–11; M. Clarke, The Tempting Prospect: A Social History of English Watercolours (London: British Museum Publications, 1978) p. 51.
The most represented county is Yorkshire, the largest, if also perhaps favoured by Walker whose family home was in Thirsk. The 33 sites in Yorkshire and 11 in neighbouring Lincolnshire, not a popularly scenic county, contrast with much lower frequencies in the patrician sector of Buckinghamshire (eight), Berkshire (seven) and Oxfordshire (five) and the paucity in the farming country of East Anglia and the tourist country of Lakeland and North Wales.
Ibid., Vol. 2, Plate 66. On the controversy between Repton and Price and Knight see S. Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 103–30.
The Copper-Plate Magazine Vol. 2, Plate 91; Vol. 4, Plate 157. On the discourses of urban development informing the view of Birmingham see M. Berg, ‘Representations of industrial towns: Turner and his contemporaries’, in M. Rosenthal, C. Payne and S. Wilcox (eds), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays on British Landscape 1750–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 115–32.
‘Matlock’ sketchbook [Finberg XIX] D00211, Clore Galley for the Turner Bequest, London.
R. Thoroton, The Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (London: Henry Morlock, 1677), p. 490; T. Foulds, ‘“This Great House, so Lately Begun”, and all of Freestone: William Cavendish’s Italianate Palazzo called Nottingham Castle’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society 106 (2002), pp. 82–101.
C. Deering, Nottingamia Vetus et Nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of Nottingham (Nottingham: George Ayscough and Thomas Willington, 1751), p. 186.
U. Price, Essays on the Picturesque Vol. 2 (Hereford: D. Walker, 1798), p. 250n. In this note Price is making a comparison with nearby Wollaton Hall, ‘a house, which for the riches of its ornaments in the near view, and the grandeur of its masses from every point, yields to few, if any, in the kingdom’. It is interesting that Turner’s only surviving sketches in the neighbourhood of Nottingham from his 1790 tour are of Wollaton Hall (‘Matlock’ sketchbook, D00246–7) but they were not worked up into designs for publication.
J. Throsby, Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire,Republished with LargeAdditions Vol. 2 (Nottingham: Burbage, Tupman, Wilson and Gray, 1790), pp. 25, 82.
On the iconography of the river, see N. Alfrey (ed.), Trentside (Nottingham: The Djangoly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, 2001).
J.F. Sutton, The Date-Book ofRemarkable andMemorable Eevents Connected withNottingham and its neighbourhood 1750–1850 (London: Simkin and Marshall, 1852); C. Hadfield, The Canals of the East Midlands (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1966), pp. 54–6; S. Zaleski, The Nottingham Canal, Past and Present (Nottingham: Local History Press in Association with Nottingham City Council, 2001), pp. 5–8.
A. Wilton, The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens (New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 1980), pp. 41–62.
For example, after T. Barber, View of Nottingham Castle, frontispiece to The History, Amtiquities and Present State of Nottingham (Nottingham: J. Dunn, 1807); Edward Finden after William Westall, Nottingham Castle, South West View, in Great Britain Illustrated (London: Charles Tillet, 1830), p. 25. An unsigned early nineteenth-century oil painting based on Turner’s view, with additional figures, boats and trees, presently hangs in The University of Nottingham’s Personnel Department.
S. Smiles, Eyewitness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain 1770–1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 147–78.
Quoted in W.G. Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W.Turner (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 35.
S. Daniels, ‘The Implications of Industry: Turner and Leeds’, Turner Studies 6, 1 (1986), pp. 10–17.
Gage, J.M.W. Turner, p. 217; Smiles, J.M.W. Turner, p. 59; Shanes, Turner’s Picturesque Views, pp. 38–9.
Shanes, Turner’s Picturesque Views, pp. 32,43; W.S. Rodner, J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 107–13.
Shanes, Turner’s Picturesque Views, pp. 18–23; E. Helsinger, ‘Turner and the Representation of England’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 103–26.
J. Coney, Architectural Beauties of Continental Europe in a Series of Views of RemarkableAncient Edifices, Civil and Ecclesiastical, in France, the Low Countries, Germany and Italy (London: J. Harding, 1826).
S. Smiles, ‘Picture Notes’, Turner Studies 8, 1 (1988), pp. 53–9.
Newcastle, Henry Pelham Fiennes, Duke of, An Address to All Classes and Conditions of Englishmen (London T. & W. Boone, 1832).
R.A. Gaunt, ‘The political activities and opinions of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle 1785–1851’, unpublished PhD thesis University of Nottingham, 2000, pp. 154–216; J. Beckett, ‘The Nottingham Reform Bill Riots of 1831’, ParliamentaryHistory Supplement, October 2005, in press. My thanks to Professor Beckett for allowing me to see this before publication.
J. Hicklin, The History ofNottingham Castle, from the Danish Invasion to its Destruction by Rioters in 1831 (London: Hamilton, Adams,1831), p. 196.
JGN Uohn Gough Nichols], ‘Description of Nottingham Castle’, Gentleman’s Magazine new series, vol. 101, part 2 (1831), pp. 393–6.
The hearing is reprinted as an appendix to Hicklin, The History of Nottingham Castle; reported in The Times, 11 August 1832.
A Descriptive Catalogue ofDrawings by J.M.W. Turner for Views in England and Wales • and also for Sir Walter Scott’s Poetical Works (London: J. Moyes, 1833), no. 60.
I owe this insight to Nicholas Alfrey, who, in a commentary on an early draft of this chapter, showed how the vignette structure accounted for many of the changes I described. See his account of Turner’s vignettes in N. Alfrey, ‘A Voyage Pittoresque: Byron, Turner and Childe Harold’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 32 (1988), pp. 80–96. Also J. Pigott, Turner’s Vignettes (London: Tate Gallery, 1993).
The colours of the drawing may have faded. In a note on a touched proof, Turner told the engraver to ‘get the sky right’. Rawlinson, The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner, p. 154.
H. Boswell, Views and Representations of the Antiquities of England and Wales (London: Alexander Hogg, 1786), np.
Shanes is surely right to identify this as arson, but not, also, on a precipitous rock face, as ‘stubble-burning’, Turner’s Picturesque Views, p. 40.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. I, Of General Principles, and of Truth, new edition (London: George Allen, 1897), pp. 381–2.
Along with her wheel, a broken rudder is one of Fortuna’s emblems. For the use of a rudder as an image of the tiller of the ship of state see Repton’s vignette, reproduced in Daniels, Humphry Repton, p. 22. Even allowing for Turner’s transpositions, it is surely too far-fetched for Shanes to say the rudder ‘exactly resembles a butcher’s cleaver … complete with blood red handle’, Turner’s Picturesque Views, p. 41.
Hadfield, The Canals of the East Midlands, pp. 120–2; M. Denney, Historic Waterways Scenes: London and South-East England (Ashbourne: Moorland, 1980), no. 143. I am grateful to Sheila Cooke, Shardlow Heritage Trust, Denny Plowman, Nottingham Castle Museum, and P.J. Sillitoe, National Waterways Museum, for information on this.
See the meanings listed in the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (London: Book Club Associates, 1979), pp. 1036–7.
This was first noted by Eric Shanes in Turner’s England 1810–1838 (London: Cassell, 1996), p. 229.
T. Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with a Memoir of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1830), Vol. 1, pp. 337–9.
J.V. Beckett with S. Aley, Byron and Newstead: the Aristocrat and the Abbey (Newark NJ and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press, 2001), p. 280.
D.B. Brown, Turner and Byron (London: Tate Gallery, 1992).
Alfrey, ‘A Voyage Pittoresque’; ‘Reading into Turner’, the 2000 Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture, Turner Society Newsletter, no. 85, 2000, pp. 6–10.
The details of the picture are described in C. Powell, Turner’s Rivers ofEurope: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel (London: Tate Gallery, 1991), pp. 112–13.
A. Peach, ‘Portraits of Byron’, The Walpole Society (2000), pp. 1–144 (27–33); C. Kenyon Jones, ‘Fantasy and transfiguration: Byron and his portraits’, in F.Wilson (ed.), Byromania (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 109–36.
R.A. Voyler, The Graphic Work of George Cruikshank (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), p. 2.
‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ Canto I, lines 29, pp. 101–2, 116; Canto II, line 653, Canto Ill, line 874, in J.J. McGann (ed.), Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
The politics of Turner’s landscapes have always proved hard to pin down as a symbolic point of view; scenes of ploughing in 1809, woollen manufacture in 1815, canal transport in 1833, or a steam express train in 1844, signal the distributions of power in the land, in widening fields of vision. Daniels, Fields of Vision, pp. 112–45.
Shanes, Turner’s Picturesque Views, p. 15. Umbrella prints were illustrations torn from books and magazines before disposal for pulping and sold cheaply, for a penny or less, in the street pinned to the inside of umbrellas.
Private communication from the picture’s owner. Bough was a member of the Royal Society of Artists and exhibited in London until the 1870s.
On the 1940 purchase National-Art Collections Fund Thirty-Seventh Annual Report 1940 (London: NACF 1941), p. 9. The cost, for the time and the city, was a substantial £230, to which the NACF contributed £50. That same year Turner’s 1802 drawing Edinburgh from the Water of Leith was purchased by the fund, out of the Cochrane Trust, for £315 and presented to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. In 1940 Nottingham also purchased, for £15, Paul Sandby’s water-colour East View of Nottingham Castle (1777). My thanks to Michael Cooper for discussing with me relevant material in the files of the Nottingham Castle Museum.
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Daniels, S. (2005). Reforming Landscape: Turner and Nottingham. In: de Bolla, P., Leask, N., Simpson, D. (eds) Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502048_2
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