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| Towne - A Sepculchre by the road between Rome and the Ponte Nomentana, 1780 |
ST: So,
Francis Towne. It feels entirely typical of Gists and Piths' approach that one of the first pieces we've posted since its reinstatement
is a review of an exhibition (which has been running since January) of an
obscure-ish English watercolourist (long since dead), detailing the
architectural revenants of a civilisation (classical Rome) that had given over
to inertia and decline many centuries before Towne arrived with his
paintbrushes. Read into that what you will. Nonetheless, the
paintings in the exhibition in question were genuinely a revelation.
Jonathan Jones had raved about them in the Guardian, and given that I usually
think he's an insufferable blowhard, I was initially sceptical, but it turns
out in this one instance his opinion was actually worth airing. These
paintings are, in a way, hymns to light, to the way light moves across the
landscape, across architectural detail, creating an architecture of its own in
shadow. I was just taken aback by them in a way I really hadn't expected.
RS: They
whipped it, didn’t they? I arrived at the exhibition with absolutely no idea of
what to expect (which is often my modus operandi), but these paintings were a
complete revelation. It took a while to work out why, but I think it has something
to do with Towne’s interest in the architectural detail of those ruins. It
would be easy to create something self-consciously Romantic from what is now
quite a hackneyed subject (and indeed some of the later, reworked paintings
edge towards this) but the paintings I most enjoyed were those where the
texture and patterning of the stones themselves were the focus. Despite the
locations themselves being almost overwhelming in scale, Towne is just as aware
of their fine detail as he is of their overall impact, which suggests a level
of obsessive observation that I can only admire.
ST: Yes,
the detailing was eye-catching. I think
part of the reason they were so surprising as a series was that we’ve been led
to believe (wrongly) that watercolour is a medium that favours gauzy abstraction,
whereas if you’re after hard and glittering detail, oils are the paints for
you. It’s a very English tradition, in a
way, painting en plein air well before
it was popularised by the French, but painting in the open in England means
rain, means mist, means a landscape that’s almost perpetually veiled and
blurred. But there’s none of that in
Towne (partly due, I’m sure, to the fact that it rains less in Italy, but also
because that’s not the way Towne’s eye is inclined): these are deeply architectural pictures, not simply
because of the subject matter, but because of the sculptural uses to which
Towne puts the light. There’s so much
weight to these paintings, even as they’re so filled with light and space.
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| Towne - Inside the Colosseum, 1780 |
RS: I
think you’re right, watercolour as a medium often gets a raw deal in the popular
imagination. It’s often associated with the kind of appallingly precious flower-strewn
landscapes that only surface as budget jigsaw puzzles, when actually
watercolour allows for a lucidity and precision that is very difficult to
achieve with oil painting. Watercolour Challenge
has a lot to answer for. Admittedly,
it’s far easier to paint en plein air with
watercolours since you don’t have to worry about passing insects getting stuck
to your canvas, but watercolours are too often viewed as sketches rather than as
finished works. It speaks volumes that Towne left this collection to the
British Museum because at that point the Royal Academy didn’t consider
watercolours to be “proper” art. But this exhibition included a couple of the
oil paintings that Towne based on the watercolours, and they just don’t have
the same impact. In oils, the ruins feel stolid rather than substantial, and
without the translucency of watercolour even the natural elements of the
landscapes feel flat rather than three dimensional.
ST: It’s the difference between the world seen with the naked eye,
and the world as envisaged by a particularly Romantically-minded
cinematographer, isn’t it? And it’s a
shame, in a way, that Towne felt the need to try his hand at oils, because
watercolours were clearly his medium; he very much made them his own. I kept thinking about the notion of the watercolour
as preliminary sketch during our time in the exhibition, and its relationship
to writing. Watercolours are, or can be
conceived as, the visual equivalent of a writer’s journals: they’re not the finished
work, but point to the possibilities of the finished work. But I increasingly find journals and diaries
exciting in and of themselves: I find, too, that they age better than the ‘finished’
work from the same era. Dorothy
Wordsworth’s journal entry on the stand of daffodils that inspired Wordsworth’s
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ reads, give or take a couple of era-specific particularities
of phrasing, as though it were written last week. Old Bill’s poem, excellent as it is, has its
period written through it like Blackpool through a stick of rock. The same pertains to watercolours and oils of
a given era. The ‘serious’ painting in
the 18th and early 19th centuries is, primarily,
narrative, or mythic: the landscape has to mean
something, and however well-executed the incidental details of the painting, it’s the meaning that dominates.
For Towne, it’s the act of looking that’s the subject, chiefly, or that’s
my reading, at least: these
paintings are ecstatic acts of looking,
and looking closely.
RS: And also of trusting your artistic judgement to a different
degree than you see with the oil paintings. There’s an immediacy to the
watercolours that comes in part from the nature of the medium. You haven’t got
time to mess about, particularly in a Mediterranean climate. The exhibition
made me think of Georges Perec’s Bartlebooth, knocking out a watercolour
seascape in an afternoon. The best watercolours have that level of confidence,
and Towne’s work better than his oils because he hasn’t second guessed himself
too much about the composition or the palette. Plus that impressionistic quality
is more realistic to our eyes; it allows the artist to make a choice between
polished detail and blurred background, while the painterly tradition of Towne’s
era demands a more consistent level of focus throughout the plane of vision. With
these watercolours you have more room, as a viewer, to fill in those subtle gaps
yourself rather than having every element of the painting wallop you over the
head with its intended meaning.
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| Towne - Inside the Colosseum, 1780 |
ST: That’s why they feel so modern, or not so era-bound at any
rate. I think, post-impressionism, we
have a different conception of what a landscape painting should do.
That narrative tradition has died out, by and large – though painters
like George Shaw are renewing the hyperrealism of the older tradition in
mutated form – and there’s no way back as a viewer to really see what
contemporary audiences would have seen: we can only talk about technical
details, the quality of the light, the composition, and so forth. (Also worth noting is the fact that this
allows previously comparatively neglected figures, like Samuel Palmer and Towne
himself, to be rediscovered and reappraised.) Maybe the contemporaneity of Towne’s Rome
paintings is aided by the absence of historical detail from his own period:
these Roman revenants have been around forever, or may as well have been – they’re
almost natural rather than historical phenomena, like the trees and the cliffs
they’re set among – and the few scattered figures that do appear scurrying
through the huge stone corridors are sketched in a rather cursory manner (quite
at odds with the palpable architectural presence of the ruins themselves), in
such a way that they could be Italian citizens who’d wandered into the frame
during Towne’s sketching of the scene, or they might just as readily be ghosts,
or flash-forwards to our own era. You
get the sense that these paintings will feel just as fresh in 100 years’ time
as they do now.
RS: I need some lunch. (Gannettry
ensues.) Right. Those little figures, who are often absolutely dwarfed by the
rest of the composition, are a wonderful example of all the things we’ve been
talking about. The oil paintings of these scenes do sometimes have people in
them, but they tend to be quite awkward, fixed little manikins who are eternally
of their own time. In contrast, the vagueness of the watercolour figures allows
them to exist outside time, particularly since their clothing is so lightly
drawn as to be as suggestive of togas as it is of more contemporary dress. They
don’t anchor the painting to any specific time, but they also remind us that
these are landscapes that you can move through. In fact, Towne’s tiny people
remind me of the blurred figures captured in early street photography, where
you only get a sense of an individual’s movement through space rather than of
their face. It adds something almost improvisatory to the paintings, so that
you have an appreciation of the scale of the ruins without some ponderous
numpty throwing allegorical shapes and generally undermining the sense that
Towne has captured a single flicker of time out of all the ages that these
buildings have been standing. That might be why I like these watercolours so
much, you have the sneaking feeling that if you turn away from one and then
look back, those little figures might have moved. Not in an M.R. James, scare you straight kind of way, but rather that they are just getting on with the rest of their day.
ST: Clearly lunch was an excellent idea: I really like your point about
early photography, and it’s never a bad thing to shoehorn an M. R. James
reference into an exhibition review. I’m
sure there’s more we could say, but nothing we could add would be a match for
the paintings themselves. The Townes are
on display until mid-August, so I would urge anyone interested to make their
way to the British Museum as soon as humanly possible. Right: shall we post this and go and do
something productive with the day instead?
RS: Lunch is always a good idea and yes, let’s trundle off,
possibly to find cake.
ST: Capital! Avanti!
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