Travel And/As Enigma

Recent work on travel by scholars Nicola Watson (The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain [2008]), Zoë Kinsley (Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812 [2008]), and Ann C. Colley (Victorians in the Mountains [2010]) has added markedly to our understanding of British travel in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through its foregrounding of issues of class, gender, and the changing understanding of landscape aesthetics and theories of the sublime. The books in this review supplement this discussion by their emphasis on Anglo-French experiences of travel in the period.

The beautifully illustrated art folio prepared by Ian Warrell, with contributions by Phillipa Simpson, Alan Crockham, Nicola Moorby, and Director of the National Gallery Nicholas Penny, offers not only faithful and copious reproductions of key works by Claude and Turner but also a detailed analysis of this fascinating relationship between an Old Master and his ardent modern disciple. What Turner himself purposely and almost yearly traveled from England to the Continent to study, scholars today can taste in this often side-by-side presentation of both artists' works.

In his foreword, Penny situates Turner's "veneration for the past" as well as his "restless commercial acumen" and "competitive self-confidence" as fundamental to the construction of the modern artist. Perry rightly concludes that this construction is most evident in Turner's relationship to Claude, evidenced in his insertion of his own works alongside those of the Old Master in his bequest to the National Gallery's first trustees (7). In his essay "'The Land of Bliss': Turner's Pursuit of the Light and Landscapes of Claude," Warrell traces the development of this relationship as constitutive of Turner's identity as a painter. He argues that Turner learned from Claude "a means of infusing the delineation of a specific place with a profoundly imaginative response" (28). Warrell ties Turner's artistic development of plein air painting techniques to this study of the Old Master; the difference for Turner lay in his turning away from the "painstaking exactitude" (30) that had led Claude to pursue the perfect landscape even if it meant distorting a particular scene through the amalgamation of several landscapes—a technique aptly described in Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art. As William Hazlitt succinctly put it, "Perfection" was what Claude desired, and "I think that Claude knew this, and felt" as a result "that his were the finest landscapes in the world—that ever had been, or would ever be" (qtd. in Warrell 22).

In her contribution, "Taking in the View: The Reception of Claude in Early Nineteenth-Century London," Phillipa Simpson discovers that prints of Claude's works were made in Britain and became quite popular. Additionally, an important collection of these prints—Richard Earlom's reproduction of Claude's Liber Veritatis, which was based on his Libro di Veritá or Libro d'invenzioni of 1635 (published in Earlom's edition in England in 1774-77)—gave English audiences "very good indications of the beauties of Claude's drawings and in particular of the aerial perspective he achieved" (14). (The original volume that was the basis of Earlom's was prepared to secure Claude from unauthorized copies, imitations mistaken as originals, and misattributions.) According to Simpson, Claude created wonderfully "light-suffused landscapes" popular with collectors; these resulted from his "reverential study of nature" and his lovely combination of "natural detail and ethereal effect" (19).

Over half of Warrell's volume is dedicated to outlining the history of Turner's bequest to The National Gallery. Alan Crookham here studies the letters between Turner and early Gallery trustees, reproducing several of the holographs. Crookham documents the Gallery's displaying of Turner's massive bequest over the years, from the time of its granting at his death in 1851 through to the selection and permanent display and housing of seven of his masterpieces...