DAVID GARIFF: My name is David
Gariff.
I'm a senior lecturer here.
And today I'm going to be
talking a little bit about art
and weather.
And in fact, this is a lecture
that relates
to our current exhibition that
is now on view which is titled
True to Nature--
Open-Air Painting in Europe,
1780 to 1870.
This talk is not an overview
of the exhibition.
So this is not a talk that will
replace attending
the exhibition.
You'll still want to attend
the exhibition.
My talk is going to be a little
bit different.
It's going to actually talk more
about weather, the approach
to weather in art,
and how it moves
from an approach that could best
be termed symbolic
to an approach
that you'll see represented
in the exhibition, which is more
of what we might call empirical
or scientific.
So that's what I'm really here
today to talk to you about.
In the exhibition,
it's an exhibition of small,
for the most part,
oil sketches on paper.
They derive
from the late 18th and early
19th centuries.
And it essentially is trying
to chart for you the beginnings
of what we call
open-air painting-- when artists
actually went outside to look
at the landscape, the sky, et
cetera, to do sketches.
This activity at the end
of the 18th century was centered
in and around Rome.
Artists
from all European countries
came to Rome, and then they sort
of fanned out into what we call
the Roman Campagne,
the countryside,
to find these lovely views.
And then in fact, they even
moved further south to Naples,
down into Calabria, and then
they, in fact
crossed, over often into Sicily.
And what they were attempting
to do
was to capture
the fleeting effects of sky,
clouds, and, in many ways,
weather out in the open air.
The exhibition features about
100 works from a variety
of different artists.
As I said, they're all
small works.
They're works on paper.
They would have been painted,
for the most part,
by an artist sitting out
in nature on a stool
and having his paint
box on his lap
and using the top of his paint
box as his support.
I'll show you an example of that
as we go along.
Most of these works
were actually destroyed
because they were thought
of just as sketches.
Very rarely were they actually
signed works.
And none of them really were
intended to be exhibited.
So it represents a very
important chapter
in open-air painting that,
in some ways, presages and sets
the foundation
for later impressionism,
as the impressionists begin
to go outside and paint
in the open air.
We're probably more
familiar with that.
But they owe a great debt
to these artists that are
represented in this exhibition.
But as I said, my talk is not
about the exhibition per se,
it's about Western artists'
engagement
with the outdoor effects
of light and atmosphere
and natural phenomena of wind
and rain,
snow, in effect, what we call,
for lack of a better term,
weather.
And as I said, I hope to trace
this influence, this interest
from a more symbolic approach,
ultimately to the kind
of scientific approach
that's represented
in the exhibition.
So let's get started.
The best place to begin
is in the beginning.
So when we talk about the idea
of weather, in many ways,
we can go all the way back
to the place where it first
really appears as a topic
or as a subject.
And that would certainly
be in the Bible
in the Old Testament,
and more specifically,
in the first chapter of Genesis.
What I'm showing you here
is a psalter.
It's a book of hours.
It's a French book of hours
from around 1243.
It's the hours of Guiluys
Boisleux, who is from France.
This is today at the Morgan
Library and Museum in New York
City.
And on the left, you see four
images that I then show you
on the right in greater detail.
And if we look at those four
images, the upper left image
is a depiction of a creation
scene from day one of Genesis.
So Christ stands there
with this nimbus halo,
his right hand holding
and referring to this disk.
And that disk or a sphere or orb
is just a disk that is enclosing
a series of colored dots, which
you maybe can see better
on the right.
That would relate to Genesis
1:1--2.
Then in the upper right
and in the lower left, those two
go together.
The upper right image and then
the lower left image is probably
the creation scene
on the second day.
Christ again standing
with his hand raised
and with this orb that's divided
now into firmament and waters.
So now there's a division
between the firmament,
the heavens, and the waters.
So this would be Genesis 1,
versus 6 through 8.
And then in the lower right,
which is the creation scene
on the third day.
Because now we can begin to see
little plants peeking up.
This is Christ again standing
there dividing the firmament
and the Earth.
And so we see these three
little trees with some water.
That's, again, Genesis 1.
So let's just go through some
of those passages in Genesis.
Day one, we find this phrase
or this passage, "Then God said,
'Let there be light'--
and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it
was good.
And God divided the light
from the darkness.
God called the light Day
and the darkness he called
Night."
Then on day two, the passage
that would be pertinent, "Then
God said, 'Let there be
a firmament in the midst
of the waters, and let it divide
the waters from the waters.'
Thus God made the firmament
and divided the waters which
were under the firmament
from the waters which were
above the firmament,
and it was so.
And God called
the firmament Heaven."
And then day three in the lower
right would pertain to this
passage, "Then God said,
'Let the waters under
the heavens be gathered together
into one place, and let the dry
land appear,' and it was so.
And God called the dry land
Earth, and the gathering
together of the waters
he called Seas."
In essence, that little orb
or sphere we might think
of as sort
of self-contained weather
system, in many ways.
And that idea continues when we
look at this painting
on the right which takes us now
into the Renaissance.
And this is a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch.
It is the famous Triptych,
The Garden of Earthly Delights
that's in the Prado
from around 1500.
I'm sure you're
familiar with the interior
panels.
There are three scenes, one
of earth, and then flanked
by heaven and hell.
But this is the altar piece when
it is closed, not open.
So to reveal those other scenes,
you would have to open up
this panel here, these two
panels to reveal the scene
that you're probably more
familiar with.
And what we have here is exactly
the same concept of this kind
of creation scene in this kind
of orb of atmosphere
and weather.
In fact, up here is God,
this tiny little figure
in the cosmos,
which is all dark.
And across the top
there is an inscription which
isn't genesis.
It's Psalm.
It's Psalm 33.
And what it says is quote,
"For he spake, and it was done;
he commanded, and it stood
fast."
So that's the inscription
across the top of those two
panels.
This is probably representing
the third day, again, because we
begin to see in the Bosch
painting
the presence of plant life
beginning to sort of emerge
from the waters.
So this concept of weather
in this kind
of self-contained orb.
It has a very long history.
It's tied especially to Genesis.
Here is the prophet Jeremiah
on the left by Michelangelo
from the Sistine Chapel,
the ceiling.
This dates through 1508 to 1512.
And I'm comparing it, rather
strangely, to a painting
on the right by Frederic Church,
the American painter.
It's called Beacon, off Mount
Desert Island.
And it dates to 1851.
It's in a private collection
today.
Certainly, Jeremiah
in the Old Testament
rails about the effects of light
and atmosphere and wind and sea.
So in Jeremiah 10,
verses 12 to 13, he says, "It is
he who made the Earth
by his power, who established
the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding
stretched out the heavens.
When he utters his voice,
there is a tumult of waters
in the heavens, and he makes
the mist rise from the ends
of the earth.
He makes lightning for the rain,
and he brings forth the wind
from his storehouses."
That's Jeremiah.
But we find similar ideas
in the New Testament, especially
in Matthew, Matthew 16:2--3
where we read, "He answered
them, 'When it is evening, you
say, it will be fair weather,
for the sky is red.
And in the morning it will be
stormy today for the sky is red
and threatening.'
You know how to interpret
the appearance of the sky,
but you cannot interpret
the signs of the times."
That's in Matthew.
Now, what's interesting is
this phrase
"it will be fair weather
for the sky is red,
and in the morning
it will be stormy today
for the sky is
red and threatening."
We, today, have
the modern proverb that comes
down to us, and it probably
comes from this passage
in Matthew, which is, of course,
"Red sky at night, sailor's
delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors
take warning."
So that passage about trying
to monitor the weather
and whether it's a good day
to be out on the seas probably,
in fact, comes from that passage
in Matthew.
Now, in terms of the Frederic
Church, as I said,
this is a painting from 1851.
In 1850, Church went to Mount
Desert Island in Maine
because he had heard
that the marine views, the sea
and the sky
were just spectacular there,
among the finest in the country,
people had told him.
And that's what he wanted
to experience.
This is one
of the great paintings
from that time in Maine.
This was very favorably received
by the critics.
One critic wrote about it,
I quote, "The whole illimitable
expanse of sky and ocean
is
open to your astonished eyes."
So just in this kind
of comparison
between the writings
of Jeremiah, the Old Testament,
the writings of Matthew, the New
Testament,
and coming towards Frederic
Church long after that,
thousands of years later,
we sort of encapsulate here
this movement from weather
interpreted in more
symbolic ways
to an artist who is literally
trying to come to terms
with the empirical facts
of weather and sky
and rain and sea, et cetera.
But this is a path we can trace
both in the visual arts
and also in literature.
And I'll make some references
to literature in a few minutes.
Staying with some paintings that
are in our permanent collection,
here is a painting on the left
that we used to give
to Tintoretto.
We no longer give it
to Tintoretto.
In fact, we don't give it
to an Italian anymore.
We think it's a Dutch painting
by a man named Lambert Sustris.
It's Christ at the Sea
of Galilee on the left,
from the 1570s.
And another painting that's
from our permanent collection,
although I venture to say most
people don't really seek it out,
it's in the room,
the 18th century Italian room
where we have Tiepolo
and Panini.
This is by Alessandro Magnasco.
It's another portrayal of Christ
at the Sea of Galilee.
But this
is from the 18th century, 1740s.
So when we talk about sort
of the symbolic aspects
of weather, certainly the Bible,
biblical storms and especially
storms at sea are particularly
relevant.
But those storms very often
are symbolic in the sense
that it's not just
about a storm,
it's about a storm that
is some kind of test of faith.
It has some kind of connection
to God providing protection
for his people or protection
from natural storms
or causing natural storms
to destroy people.
So they could be
a personal crisis of an apostle,
whatever.
So there's a symbolism normally
attributed to the storm.
So in Matthew 14:28--32, this is
the actual passage that relates
to Christ on the Sea of Galilee
when the apostles see Jesus
and he says, come to me.
And then Peter says, well,
I'd have to walk on water.
But if you're a man of faith,
go ahead.
And then Peter sort of panics.
So here's the passage.
It's Matthew 14:28--32.
And you can see Peter in both
of these slides beginning
to sort of exit the boat.
"And Peter answered him
and said, Lord, if it be thou,
bid me come unto thee
upon the waters.
And he said, Come.
And Peter went down
from the boat
and walked upon the waters
to come to Jesus.
But when he saw the wind,
he was afraid.
And beginning to sink,
he cried out, saying, Lord, save
me.
And immediately Jesus stretched
forth his hand
and took hold of him
and saith it unto him, O thou
of little faith,
wherefore didst thou doubt?
And when they were gone up
into the boat, the wind ceased."
So that's the passage
of the very famous event where
Peter attempts to come to Jesus
on the waters.
There is another storm at sea
that relates to the apostles.
It's not
this particular episode.
It's when Jesus and the apostles
are all in a boat together
and then a storm comes up.
And this is in Matthew 8:24--26,
"Suddenly a furious storm came
up on the lake so that the waves
swept over the boat.
But Jesus was sleeping.
The disciples went and woke him
saying, Lord, save us!
We are going to drown!
He replied, You of little faith,
why are you so afraid?
Then he got up and rebuked
the winds and the waves,
and it was completely calm."
Now, that is another subject
that's often portrayed
by painters.
It's not the one you see here,
which is about Peter.
But it's the painting that you
see here on the left
by Rembrandt.
This is Rembrandt's painting
of The Storm on the Sea
of Galilee from 1633.
This is the painting that was
stolen from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum.
And it's never been located.
So that theft was in 1990.
This painting is still missing.
So if you see it turn up
on The Antiques Roadshow--
[LAUGHTER]
You'll know.
You'll know.
Yeah, buy it.
You'll probably get it really
cheap.
The painting on the right
is our painting
from the National Gallery
of The Mill
by Rembrandt from 1645.
So another passage that relates
to the story I just mentioned
of Jesus and the disciples
in the boat is also told
in Mark, Chapter 4:39--41.
And it ends in the same way
that the passage that I just
read in Matthew ends.
It ends by talking about Jesus.
And quote, "He woke up
and rebuked the wind,
and said to the sea, 'Peace!
Be still' Then the wind ceased
and there was a dead calm.
And they were filled with great
awe and said to one another,
'Who then is this, that even
the wind and the sea obey
him.'" So that tells the same
story slightly differently
in Mark as opposed to Matthew.
So again, this storm at sea
is very important.
It obviously owes a lot
to biblical sources.
The Rembrandt mill on the right
is interesting because, in fact,
it shows a storm,
but it's a storm that
is passing.
Rembrandt probably based
this scene on his father's mill
up on the ramparts of Leiden.
And of course, for most
of the history of this painting,
especially later
after the 17th century
into the 18th and 19th
centuries, people approached
this painting thinking that it
was a very, very dark
and moody and romantic painting.
And the basic reason they
believed that was
because the painting was dirty.
And it was under many layers
of yellowed varnish and dirt.
So for example, when Turner saw
this painting
in the 19th century
when it was in London,
he did not see it the way
that we're looking at it today.
It was, to him, a very dark
and brooding and romantic
and rather threatening painting.
When we acquired the painting
in 1977, we decided--
it was a big decision, all
the eyes of the world
or upon us--
we decided to clean
the painting.
So it was cleaned between 1977
and 1979.
And lo and behold, the storm
was in fact a blue sky.
And the storm was passing off
to the left, which gave us
a completely different
interpretation of the painting.
The symbolism is rather
positive as opposed to negative.
The storm is passing.
The storm clouds have passed.
And there are clear skies ahead
for the ships at that one sea.
So again, this had
a long history of being
interpreted in a particular way.
In the case of The Mill,
it was specifically given
this rather dark and foreboding
interpretation, though
for the most part because it was
particularly dirty.
But the idea of what we call
in romantic literature and art
"the storm-tossed boat."
There is an entire literature
in romanticism, both in poetry,
literature, and painting,
about the image
of the storm-tossed boat.
So here we see
a French romantic, Delacroix,
these are two paintings
by Eugene Delacroix.
Christ on the Sea of Galilee,
1841, on the left, that's
in the Nelson Adkins Museum
in Kansas City.
And on the right, same subject,
Christ on the Sea of Galilee
Delacroix from 1854,
that's at the Walters
in Baltimore.
This subject in 19th century
romanticism, even when it comes
from a biblical source,
is appropriated by the romantics
as more symbolic
of their own personal storms,
that they are these figures
themselves that suffer
from a kind
of emotional approach
to life, sort
of Byronic romantic hero.
So in Byron and in Shelley
and in Keats, think of the rhyme
of the ancient mariner,
this image
of the storm-tossed boat,
the storm threatened boat,
in other words, weather that's
very forbidding and very
foreboding is common.
It turns into a kind of stock
romantic theme.
Now, here are two paintings that
are exactly of the same subject,
although I guess you wouldn't
know it by just looking at them.
And they pit
against each other the two
great names in 17th century
northern Baroque painting, that
is Rubens against Rembrandt.
We always talk about those two
artists
as sort of in comparison.
So on the left is Rubens' Stormy
Landscape with Philemon
and Baucis from 1625.
That's in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum in Vienna.
And then our painting
on the right of the same story,
Philemon and Baucis from 1658
by Rembrandt on the right.
This is a very small painting
that's in our Rembrandt
galleries.
It's a beautiful painting.
This is a painting that actually
looks so dark, you think it is
dirty.
But in fact, it's not.
It's in pristine condition.
It's just a very, very deeply
shadowed work by Rembrandt.
So here we don't have
a biblical storm,
we have a mythological storm.
So now even in the realm
of mythology, the story
of Philemon and Baucis
comes from Ovid,
The Metamorphoses.
And it's the story
of this elderly couple
in Phrygia.
Philemon, the husband, Baucis'
wife who are very poor
live by themselves
in this small little cottage.
And one day, the god Zeus
and Mercury come to visit
this town, but they're disguised
as beggars.
And they go from door to door
throughout the town
and ask people in each home
if they can provide them
with some food and some shelter,
that they're poor, they're
destitute as they go from house
to house.
And in each case, they're
rebuffed by the owner
of the home.
They're told to go away.
They're about to leave.
And then as they approach
the outskirts of the town,
they see a little cottage
that they hadn't approached yet.
So that's the cottage
of Philemon and Baucis.
So they go again to the door,
they knock, and they say
the same thing.
You know, we're poor,
can you help us?
Give us some food.
And here Philemon and Baucis who
are incredibly destitute,
they have very little
themselves, invite these two
beggars into their home.
And they set the table
and they provide them
with all manner of what they
have, which isn't very much.
They have a little bit of wine
in a pitcher.
And as Baucis is pouring it out,
she starts to notice that when
it gets empty,
it miraculously refills.
And she can keep pouring out
this wine.
And she thinks, clearly
something's up with that.
They have a goose.
And they actually say, you know,
we can slaughter this goose
for you.
It's the only goose that we
have.
And the gods say, no, that's OK.
You can keep your goose.
In any case, finally the gods
reveal themselves, that they're
not these beggars
but that they are Zeus
and Hermes or Mercury.
And Philemon and Baucis are,
of course, shocked.
And the gods then say to them,
because you took us in,
because you were
kind and compassionate,
we would like to grant you
a wish.
What can we do for you?
And so Philemon and Baucis could
have asked for anything.
And the one thing they asked for
is may we be the two who tend
to your temple, that's
the first thing.
But the more important part
of that wish is that we do not
want to die separately.
We want to die together so one
of us
doesn't have to live
without the other.
So can you see to it that when
we go, we go together.
So the gods are quite touched
by this and moved by this.
And they grant these wishes,
the wish especially for Philemon
and Baucis to tend the temple.
All of that is encapsulated,
really, in the Rembrandt.
What Rubens is interested in
is what happens next.
Once the gods find this couple
that's very compassionate,
now they've gone
through this entire town
and they're ready to leave.
But now because they've been
rebuffed by everybody else
in the town, they're gonna
destroy the town.
So in the painting on the left
by Rubens, you have to really
hunt to find the gods
and Philemon and Baucis.
They're right here.
But what the scene really
is about is this storm that
is now going to destroy
this town and all the people
in it who rebuffed the gods.
So for Rubens,
this is
a classic, great, Baroque
dramatic storm, thunder
and lightning,
and the whole area is being sort
of inundated.
So again, here the storm
is driven
by a mythological story, which
is, again, very common,
in addition to biblical sources.
Now, in America, we have
a painting like this-- two
paintings--
that are part of a series
that you probably are familiar
with, The Voyage of Life
by Thomas Cole
in the 19th century, 1842.
There were four paintings.
I'm just showing you
the last two--
The Voyage of Life, on the left,
Manhood and the Voyage of Life,
on the right, Old Age,
both from 1842.
This tells the story
of a young boy from his birth
to his sort of childhood,
his adulthood,
and then to old age.
This, in essence, is certainly
religious.
It's spiritual, shall we say,
maybe not specifically
religious.
But it certainly has
a spiritual connotation.
And that's the reason these four
paintings were then translated
into prints.
And in the United States,
every home had the four prints
in their home
as a way of having
a didactic purpose for teaching
your children about what you can
expect as you grow up
and how to deal
with the vicissitudes of life,
so to speak.
But what's important in Cole's
images here, beyond just
the story--
In the story on the left,
you see adulthood, this man
has grown up to adulthood.
Now, he's facing the rapids.
He's lost the tiller
of his little boat.
The hourglass is broken off.
Time is running out.
He's heading
towards this disaster.
On the right, finally,
in old age,
he is rescued by the guardian
angel who had been with him
from the time he was born who
now in old age
is about to help him sort
of ascend up into the heavens.
But the interesting thing here
beyond that story
is the portrayal
of the landscape and the sky
and the threatening effects
of the weather and the wind
and the rain, all of which
Cole is very, very sensitive to.
So here he's kind of grafting
on those two interests.
Cole wrote one of the most
famous essays
about American landscape
that everybody has to read
from 1836.
It is called Essay on American
Scenery.
And what Cole said in that essay
was that quote, "The soul
of all scenery--"
that "the sky," quote,
"is the soul of all scenery.
In it are the fountains of light
and shade and color."
So he was emphasizing
the importance of a painter
to paint sky and the drama
of a sky,
that that's
the soul of the landscape
painting.
And then he went on to speak
to the magnificence
of American landscape.
This is something that greatly
influenced Frederic Church,
by the way,
where Cole says
that the American landscape is
quote,
"For variety and magnificence,
American skies are unsurpassed."
So in many ways, what Cole was
also reacting to
was the inferiority complex
that Americans had
vis-a-vis European painting
at this time.
And Cole was asserting
the importance
of American painting.
Now, that does take us
to the Europeans, some
of the Europeans.
And one of the most important
certainly is on the left,
Turner.
This is Turner's great painting
Snow Storm.
And then subtitled,
Hannibal and His Army Crossing
the Alps from 1812.
You have to really hunt again
to see the army.
And in a comparable way,
the painting that we have
at the National Gallery, which
is by John Martin,
a great admirer of Turner's,
Joshua Commanding the Son
to Stand Still Upon Gideon
from 1816.
So these are essentially
contemporary paintings.
This is now weather, shall we
say, in service to history
and religion.
The Turner painting is history,
Hannibal.
The Martin painting is still
religion, Joshua.
So you see again how artists
think about portraying
these events from the Bible
or from history.
But in both cases, it's really
the storms that are the subject.
It's not so much
the actual portrayal
of this specific event.
So the snow storm
and the effects of light
and all
of the atmospheric effects
of the Turner
are just absolutely magnificent
and closely observed.
And even in the Martin,
it's a similar effect.
So you can see these storms kind
of becoming more and more, even
within a painting that has
a mythological
or historical or religious
subject.
The setting, the effects
of the storm
or the sea or the weather
are becoming important, in fact,
more important than the story.
That seems to really culminate
in these two paintings
by Turner.
I don't know if you were here
many, many years ago, we did
a beautiful Turner show.
And we had this painting
on the left in the exhibition.
These paintings are a pair.
They they're meant to go
together.
And they speak to a couple
of different ideas.
But they speak to a very
empirical-- although they have,
in fact, biblical subjects--
they're really paintings that
are much more
about empirical observation.
So the painting on the left,
which has an incredibly long
title.
It's called Light and Colour--
Goethe's Theory-- the Morning
after the Deluge--
Moses Writing the Book
of Genesis.
That's from 1843.
That's the whole title.
And then its pendant,
the painting that goes with it,
is the one on the right
by Turner called Shade
and Darkness--
the Evening
of the Deluge, same year, 1843.
So you see what we have here are
these explosive scenes
of a storm
and wind and rain
through these kind of almost
scientifically induced kind
of prismatic bubbles,
that circular effect
as if we're looking
through a lens.
And really the painting
on the left clearly has
a biblical connotation.
It's about God's covenant
with man after the flood.
And Turner writes about all
this.
The presence
of the brazen serpent
raised by Moses
in the wilderness, all that's
in there.
Although, I would
defy you to find it all,
but it's in there.
And the same on the right,
the Evening of the Deluge,
they have those meanings.
But in essence, what
these paintings were for Turner
were an allusion to a very
important theory of color
that had been written some 30
years earlier.
And that was by the German poet
and theorist and writer
and he was a jack of all trades,
Goethe.
Goethe had written a very
important text in 1810 called
Theory of Colors in which he
attempted to describe
and explain how colors behave.
He created this kind of color
wheel, a kind of a circle
in his theory.
And he divided colors up
into plus and minus colors.
Plus colors were the hot colors,
reds and yellows.
And for Goethe, they were
associated with ideas of gaiety
and warmth,
sort of happiness you might say.
The minus colors were blues,
the cooler colors, purples.
And he thought these were
symbolic of restlessness
and anxiety,
things of that nature.
So what actually Turner was
doing here, in two
different paintings,
he was trying to deal
with these two sides, the hot
and the cool side of Goethe's
own theory.
But in fact, he was probably
also taking Goethe to task here.
Because Goethe's theory stated
that color was equally
the product of light and dark.
And Turner did not believe that.
He did not believe that color
came from an equal presence
of light and dark.
So he was probably trying
to speak
to that particular aspect
of Goethe's theory
in these two paintings.
Of course, these are pretty
tough paintings, even today.
And critics in Turner's time
hated them, of course.
One critic from the times,
The London Times writing
about shade and darkness
called it quote,
"A ridiculous daub."
And then writing about
the painting at the left,
he said that it was quote, "
wretched mixture of trumpery
conceits."
Trumpery conceits?
In The Spectator,
another magazine, the critic
writing about the paintings
said that, in fact, he said,
I do think they're
intelligible as dealing
with Goethe's theories.
But then he said, but further,
we cannot follow the painter.
So after that, I have no idea
what Turner is trying to do
here.
But these paintings are wetting
the scientific eye of Turner
with this still, there is still
certainly a connotation
or a reference
to the symbolic aspects
of the storm.
And in both of these cases,
it still is, in fact,
the biblical storm.
Now, if you look
at romantic painting,
if you look at Turner
and Delacroix and Cole
and you look
at the similar ideas about how
one is approaching nature,
atmosphere, weather
effects, especially storms,
you see a similar kind of track,
a similar kind of development
in literature.
And we can, again,
for the romantics especially,
going back to Dante
or to Shakespeare or to Milton,
it's the same idea of how
these storms play
a prominent, prominent role.
So in the 19th century,
we come to that great writer
Snoopy--
actually, in the 20th century.
But one of the most famous
novels of the 19th century
that today is even sort
of parodied, obviously,
as Snoopy is doing here,
is by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
And the novel is called Paul
Clifford.
You see the first page here
on the left.
It's from 1830.
Lytton was a novelist,
a historian.
He was a close friend
with Charles Dickens.
In fact, he critiqued a lot
of Dickens' writings.
And of course, if you want
another novel
in the 19th century that
is filled with storms and mud
and all of the things certainly
Dickens' Bleak House
is a good example.
But Bulwer-Lytton writes a novel
called Paul Clifford, the story
of a man who--
this takes place
during the period
of the French Revolution.
And Clifford is a man who leads
a double life.
He's a criminal, but he also
presents himself as a kind
of upscale aristocratic
gentleman.
And the book was very successful
upon its release.
And it came to be known
for its very first sentence,
which Snoopy here is writing
in part.
And the very first sentence
of the book, which you can read
on the left, is as follows--
"It was a dark and stormy night;
the rain fell in torrents,
except at occasional intervals,
when it was checked
by a violent gust of wind which
swept up the streets--
for it is London that our scene
lies--
rattling along the house-tops,
and fiercely agitating
the scanty flame of the lamps
that struggle
against the darkness."
That's quite a sentence.
And it's, of course,
this example of an overly
ornate and flowery, really
overly descriptive prose that we
come to call today purple prose.
And Bulwer-Lytton is the sort
of master of purple prose.
But the point is in a whole host
of 19th century novels,
not just Bulwer-Lytton,
but the Bronte sisters
and others, you have
this constant reference
to these cyclonic storms.
But they're almost always tied
to a emotional relationship,
to a relationship that
is in tension or that's
threatened.
And where you probably see
it best is in Wuthering Heights.
So here I'm showing you
the poster
from the American film, one
of the great films
from the 1930s,
1939, directed by William Wyler
that had Sir Laurence Olivier
as Heathcliff.
Merle Oberon was Catherine.
David Niven was in the movie.
The cinematography was Gregg
Toland, who was
the cinematographer of Citizen
Kane with Orson Welles,
a great cinematographer.
And I'm showing you one
of the stills
from the film on the right,
which is, of course, a storm
scene.
So Emily Bronte's novel comes
out in 1847.
And it, again, was tremendously
successful.
It's filled
with
these atmospheric, melodramatic
ghosts and storms and spooky old
houses and scoundrels and all
of these romantic but tortured
relationships.
And the weather in the book
is a character.
And whenever a relationship is
about to go south,
shall we say, this the weather
sort of relates to that.
In fact, the word itself
that Bronte uses, "wuthering,"
wuthering, Bronte said was,
quote,
"descriptive
of the atmospheric tumult
on the Moors."
So she even sees that word
as symbolic of this.
There is one literary historian
who's written about this book
and about
this atmospheric tumult.
And she calls Wuthering Heights
quote, "The single greatest
instance of psycho-meteorology
in Western literature."
So you can almost tell what's
happening.
As soon as Heathcliff does
something and breaks
with Catherine, then the house
starts to crack apart and gets
struck by lightning and things
like that.
So one of the passages that's
in Wuthering Heights that
typifies this is this one.
"About midnight, while we sat
up, the storm came rattling
over the heights in full fury.
There was a violent wind, as
well as thunder, and either one
or the other split
a tree off at the corner
of the building--
a huge bough
fell across the roof,
and knocked down a portion
of the east chimney stack,
sending a clatter of stones
and soot into the kitchen fire."
This is almost as purple
as Bulwer-Lytton.
She uses the same word
"rattling."
This was a word Victorians
loved, about the wind,
that it was always rattling.
So you see it in both passages.
Later, again I'm just sort
of showing this to you
in a few examples, this tracing
of weather.
And here in the case
of romantic literature,
it's still tied to these sort
of psychological states.
Even into the 20th century,
the example I always like
to talk about
is one
of the great short stories
by James Joyce.
And that's The Dead, which
is in his collection titled
Dubliners from 1914.
Here again I'm showing you
the film, the poster on the left
for the 1987 film
that was made by John Huston,
his last film before he died.
And this was a story he always
wanted to tell.
Huston's roots went way back
to Ireland.
He loved Joyce.
His daughter Angelica stars
in this movie.
His son helped write the script
and adapt the story.
So it was a very important film
for John Houston.
I'm showing you a couple
of shots on the right.
The cinematography here was Fred
Murphy.
In The Dead it's not so much
violent storms, it's the snow
and a snow storm that
is the more relevant kind
of symbolic and dramatic detail.
The image of snow in Dubliners--
The Dead, it's certainly
a notation of weather,
without a doubt.
But it also has very subtle
metaphysical relationships
and relates to other issues.
So the most famous passage
to illustrate this
is the last phrase
or the last passage, basically,
in the book in the story.
It's one of the most beautiful
paragraphs
in Western literature.
There are certain things
I go back and read all the time
just because they're
so beautiful.
The last couple of paragraphs
in The Great Gatsby
are like that.
It's just something you go back
and read.
It doesn't matter how many times
you've read it.
And the same thing
is true with this passage
in Joyce in The Dead.
It reads, "It had begun to snow
again.
He watched sleepily the flakes,
silver and dark, falling
obliquely against the lamplight.
Yes, the newspapers were right--
snow was general
all over Ireland.
It was falling on every part
of the dark central plain,
on the treeless hills,
falling softly upon the Bog
of Allen and, farther westward,
softly falling
into the dark mutinous Shannon
waves.
It was falling, too,
upon every part
of the lonely churchyard
on the hill where Michael Furey
lay buried.
It lay thickly drifted
on the crooked crosses
and headstones,
on the spears
of the little gate,
on the barren thorns.
His soul swooned slowly as he
heard the snow falling faintly
through the universe
and faintly falling,
like the descent
of their last end,
upon all the living
and the dead."
That calls for a dramatic pause.
[LAUGHING]
That's a beautiful passage.
OK, so I've been trying to show
you this use of weather,
storms, whatever sort of
symbolically tied to history,
religion, mythology, and then
even carry through
in romantic literature to have
a more almost psychological
impact.
But where do we really start
the story of an approach
to weather or an approach
to storms and things
of this nature that it really
is very specifically scientific
and empirical?
Whenever you ask that question
in Western art,
if you don't know the answer,
just always guess Leonardo da
Vinci.
[LAUGHING]
He's probably the guy who's
responsible.
That's what I tell my students,
just guess Leonardo.
So here is our Ginevra de Benci,
obviously, from 1474, '78.
And I'm really more interested
not in the figure,
but in the landscape
to the right
that you see in that detail
which could almost stand
as a separate painting.
In the visual arts,
with Leonardo is where we really
begin to see this kind
of
empirical, scientific interest,
at least, in nature.
In other words,
it's less weather seen
as iconography and more weather
seen as a fact,
just as an empirical fact.
We see it in these paintings,
in these wonderful atmospheric
backgrounds that show not just
linear perspective,
but atmospheric perspective.
This beautiful, diaphanous
movement of atmosphere,
evaporation, and water as we go
off into the distance--
I mean, you can feel almost
the humidity and the evaporation
of water
in these parts of the painting.
What is pivotal for Leonardo,
and this is what separates him
from his colleagues Michelangelo
and Rafael, what's pivotal
for Leonardo is the eye.
He always talks
about the primacy of the eye.
Each of these other artists,
Rafael and Michelangelo,
they had a different touchstone
in their career.
For Michelangelo it's
the male nude figure.
For Rafael, it's classical art.
But for Leonardo, it was
the primacy of the eye.
And so he is constantly telling
us, just look.
Just look.
Take time and look.
So here is a drawing,
a red chalk drawing
on the left by Leonardo,
Storm Over a Valley
from 1506 to 1510.
It's in the royal collection
at Windsor.
That's a red chalk.
And on the right
is a black chalk
from the same collection,
A Deluge from 1517.
It's in these depictions
of storms
coming up
over these alpine valleys
and storms at sea and deluges,
et cetera, where you see
Leonardo beginning to really
approach nature in this very
meterologically empirical kind
of fashion.
He went out into the landscape.
He certainly did sketches
that he came back and worked on
in his studio.
He made detailed descriptions
of weather in his notebooks,
even on some of the drawings.
We know he began to collect
and categorize,
catalog fossils that he found.
Leonardo had already come
to the conclusion
that the earth was much older
than indicated, certainly,
by the Bible.
He loved, especially, freak
storms, when he would be out
and all of a sudden
there would just be a freak
thunderstorm.
One minute it was sunny,
and the next minute all
of a sudden the storm would
break.
Especially in these valleys
where the weather effects were
more--
they were harder to predict.
So he is looking at things
with the eye of a scientist,
in many ways, when he's out
in nature.
And he's fascinated
by these optical properties
of wind and rain
and atmosphere, et cetera.
Here are two drawings.
We think they're probably part
of a series of 10.
Because they're all
the same size and they're
all basically the same medium.
There's A Deluge on the left
from 1517 to '18.
And on the right, same title,
same date, Deluge, 1517.
These are part
of the collection, the Royal
Collection at Windsor.
There are 10 of these.
And they're are uniform in size.
And they're for the most part,
they're not all
in the same technique.
But they show pretty much
a prevalence for black chalk,
some pen and ink,
depending on what we're talking
about.
They're intended clearly
as finished works.
These are not studies.
These were intended by Leonardo
to be finished works.
And there's a series of 10
that he produced.
They were meant
for his own satisfaction.
They never left his studio.
What's interesting is what
scientists, specifically,
there's one art historian who
happens to also be a geologist,
she brings together these two
fields.
Her name is Ann Pizzorusso.
She is both a Renaissance art
historian and also a geologist.
And she actually claims, looking
at these drawings,
that Leonardo was
the first to really see
the swirling patterns of water
and air
that are
at the heart of a hurricane.
These rotational winds that are
part of a hurricane,
she makes the case in her book--
she published a-- it's
a wonderful book
with a horrible title.
The title of the book
is Tweeting Da Vinci, Tweeting
Da Vinci.
It came out in 2014.
And she says that he's
identifying
these swirling patterns
of a hurricane
500 years before technology has
shown these patterns to us
through satellite photographs.
She writes at one point, quote,
"Leonardo was
the first to identify
hurricanes.
What he depicted
would be discovered
by meteorologists in the 1970s
and called vortex flow patterns,
rotating masses of air or water
spinning
about an imaginary axis.
These patterns are
similar to hurricane
configurations so familiar to us
today," unquote.
So that's one of her quotes.
She goes through these drawings
and talks about them
at great length.
Here is a Leonardo drawing, one
of those series on the left,
Deluge 1517, again black chalk.
And that is a satellite image
of a hurricane on the right
that we have today.
And what you sense
in these deluge,
and clearly that's not to say
that the theme of the deluge
didn't still have for Leonardo
some deeper resonance
symbolically, maybe not even
so much biblically, but maybe
more personally about a number
of things, his old age
and other things
that were beginning to occupy
his thinking.
But in any case, he's fascinated
by these deluges that really
just pulverized everything.
They sweep across the surface.
They're these plumes of water
and lightning
issuing from these clouds.
So Leonardo is, I think,
the place to start, certainly.
And then we just see a kind
of back and forth,
artists who move more
towards that scientific strain,
artists who are still somewhat
thinking more symbolically.
And this takes us through all
of the 17th century storms
at sea, which had
different connotations,
especially if we're looking
at the low countries,
if we're looking at Holland.
These are two paintings
by Bakhuizen, Ludolf Bakhuizen.
We have a beautiful Bakhuizen.
It's the one on the left that's
in our collection, Ships
in Distress
off a Rocky Coast from 1667.
And on the right is a Bakhuizen
Christ in the Storm on the Sea
of Galilee.
So he's going back
to that source from 1695.
The painting on the right
is at the Indianapolis Museum
of Art.
Certainly, all
these Dutch storms at sea, all
these ships in distress,
often with their cargoes now
sort of scattered on the waves
as they're trying to negotiate
their way to the safety of land,
probably serve
in a traditional Dutch way, much
like their still lives,
believe it or not,
as kind of reminders of the fact
that earthly existence is
fleeting.
We're a wealthy country.
We bring our products
all over the world.
But that wealth, that prestige,
that materialism
is still something that can be
destroyed.
It can end very quickly.
In France, Vernet, Claude Joseph
Vernet, and the painting
on the right is again one
of the beautiful paintings we
have.
On the right is The Shipwreck
from 1772 in our collection.
On the left is a Storm
from 1765.
That's at the Heritage
in St. Petersburg,
a similar kind of feeling here
to the Dutch tradition
of Bakhuizen.
Here in the 18th century,
these are works that are
in the exhibition.
I will be showing you a number
of works that are
in the exhibition
as we go along.
And the work on the right
specifically
is in the exhibition.
This is the work of Fragonard,
the French rococo painter
in the 18th century.
The Watering Place on the left
from 1763 to '65 and Mountain
Landscape at Sunset
on the right from 1765.
We know certainly that Fragonard
was looking at Dutch painting,
specifically Ruisdael.
And Ruisdael is seascapes
and landscapes.
But in the 18th century
and the rococo in France,
there's a different aesthetic.
And certainly, Fragonard
is responding to his own time,
to his own 18th century rococo
sensibility.
Because now you begin to see,
especially in that sketch
on the right,
a kind of more subtle, lighter,
it's a less threatening, it has
a slightly more pastoral,
in both cases.
There certainly are
interesting cloud formations
and backlighting and all
of that.
But clearly, he's creating
a scene that's a little simply
more rococo, to put it bluntly.
We think that The Watering Place
on the left the painting that's
in a private collection,
by the way, meant to be
a pair with another painting
called Stormy Weather.
So he was probably also speaking
maybe to this idea of calm
and storm, which is very common.
We come to Gainsborough
on the left, Thomas
Gainsborough.
This is a painting
in our collection, Seashore
with Fishermen from 1781 to '82.
And then a work on the right
by a German
who it's not
that well-known today
and should be better known.
And that's the one thing
about this exhibition,
there are a number of artists,
most of whom
I'm sure you've never heard of,
but they should be better known.
And they were very important.
So this is a work on the right.
It's a gouache drawing
on vellum,
or painting on vellum,
by Johann Deitz.
Deitz is
a German from the 18th century.
The Gainsborough
is interesting because this idea
of going out into the open air.
I want to paint a landscape,
so, you know, it might
be a good idea if I go outside
and look at a landscape.
That didn't strike artists
immediately.
And Gainsborough is, of course,
the best example of this.
Because we know that Thomas
Gainsborough used to collect--
He'd go out and he'd get a clump
of dirt.
And he'd get a rock
and he'd get a piece of coal.
And he'd get some moss
and he'd get some broccoli.
He'd go to the market
and buy some broccoli.
And then he'd come back
to his studio and he'd set all
these things up on his table.
And that would be the source
of the landscape.
So very often, when you're
looking at some formation,
it's probably a piece of coal.
He may change the color,
et cetera.
But the thing I like the best
is that when you look
at a Gainsborough, his trees,
often you say to yourself, gee,
that looks like broccoli.
And then you're right because it
probably was broccoli.
He probably was looking
at a little clump of broccoli
that he bought at the market.
Now that's different than this.
And now we get into, again,
especially some of the artists
in the exhibition, these are two
paintings by a German, Johann
Dillis, D-I-L-L-I-S. Cloud
Study, 1810 to 1820 on the left,
it's a white chalk drawing
on blue paper.
And then View of the [INAUDIBLE]
Alps on the right from 1817,
which is actually black chalk
heightened with white chalk.
These works on blue paper
are particularly attractive,
at least to my eye.
Dillis is a very important
distinguished German artist
of this period right
around 1800.
He was a professor.
He was from Munich.
He was a professor of landscape
painting at the Munich Academy.
He advocated that students go
outside, in the open air,
look at cloud studies.
We have today over 150 cloud
studies by Dillis.
That's probably not all that he
did, but those are the ones that
are extant.
He did go out in the open air
and execute oil studies,
watercolors.
Watercolor especially became
something he became attracted
to.
What's interesting
is that he did paint
in the open air.
But he was also very busy.
He was an administrator,
a professor, a teacher.
He had a lot of things going on.
So often he did cloud studies
in his office
looking out his window.
He would just watch the clouds
go by when he was at his desk
in his office.
And then he would do
a quick sketch.
He was influenced by a source,
a book,
that I'm now going to introduce.
And we're going to look more
at these scientific treatises
in a second.
But the book that had
a huge impact on many
of these painters
is a scientific treatise
that they were reading.
And it was by a man named Luke
Howard, Luke Howard.
And the book is called Essay
on the Modification of Clouds,
Essay on the Modification
of Clouds.
I'm gonna come back to this
in a second.
But this book is an early study
in meteorology.
And in this book,
it's Howard who sets
out the names of the clouds
that we know today.
So the idea of cirrus
and stratus and cumulus.
In fact, he gives the clouds
their Latin names.
Those are Latin names,
of course, that we then still
use today.
So what we see as these artists
go out into the open air
and begin to really look
at the sky, that now they want
more information about actually
how does a cloud work,
how does it form, what is
its unique nature.
At the same time, we still have
though things like this.
These are two paintings we have
at the gallery.
They hang next to each other.
I've lectured on both of these
in relationship
to the idea of the sublime.
Caspar David Friedrich's
Northern Landscape, on the left,
Spring from 1825.
Friedrich, of course, is German.
And the Norwegian painter Johan
Christian Dahl on the right,
The View
from Vaekero near Christiania--
Christiania was the name of Oslo
at this time--
from 1827.
Friedrich is certainly the most
important landscape painter
working
in the northern continent
of Europe during the first half
of the 19th century
up until 1850 or so.
He is from Dresden.
And he settles in Dresden.
He travels to Berlin
and other places, but ultimately
settles in Dresden.
And is certainly Friedrich's
attitude towards nature
is certainly romantic.
I mean, he sees nature.
He's very much moved
by romantic poetry,
romantic literature,
romantic philosophy.
But what he does stress more
and more is this kind
of immensity of nature
and how nature dwarfs us
so that when you look
at a painting like this,
there are two little people
right there.
But they're
in this gigantic, immense,
spring landscape that
is a northern landscape.
It doesn't look much
like spring.
But you can see a little tufts
of things growing out that speak
to the coming of spring.
So certainly Friedrich's
paintings are still speaking
to the spirit and transience
of life, to the idea of death
and rebirth.
His earlier landscape paintings
are pretty direct because he
might even have a little shrine,
a little crucifix somewhere,
something.
I mean, he's pretty direct early
on.
But he becomes less and less
literal as he goes along
through his career.
But he once said, quote,
that the artist quote,
"should paint not only what he
sees before him,
but also what he sees
within him,"
so that your emotional response
to a landscape
should be somewhat incorporated.
Dahl, the painter on the right,
goes hand in hand
with Friedrich.
They were friends.
Dahl came from Bergen, but then
he moved to Copenhagen.
And then he meets Friedrich
in Dresden.
And then they share a house
together.
They're housemates.
So they're working side by side.
And Dahl's work owes a lot
to the spirit of Friedrich,
these backlit scenes where
you're looking over the shoulder
of figures.
So we have
these empathetic views, often
to this moody kind of landscape.
But also still beginning
to capture the qualities
of these atmospheric effects.
Paintings like the painting
on the left, so simplified
and so stratified,
sky, land,
the distant mountains,
and then the foreground, just
these horizontal registers.
In the 1970s,
I think it was '79,
Robert Rosenblum wrote
a great book about painting
in the northern romantic
tradition.
And he talks about Friedrich
as almost a precursor ultimately
to somebody like Mark Rothko,
that the sense of what you see
in Friedrich, Rothko
just pushes farther
towards pure abstraction.
These are works
in the exhibition.
I just showed you the painting
by Dahl that's not
in the exhibition.
That's
in our permanent collection.
But these two works
are in the show
by Johan Christian Dahl, Thunder
Clouds on the left from 1831.
It's at the National Gallery
in Oslo.
And the Neapolitan Coast
with Vesuvius in Eruption
on the right from 1820.
This is from the Fitzwilliam
Museum in Cambridge.
This exhibition, when it closes
here, will go to Paris.
And then it'll close
at the Fitzwilliam Museum
in Cambridge
where a lot of the works
come from.
So here now we're back
to this really closer, more
empirical observation of cloud
studies.
Notice though that Dahl
gives us land.
So he puts us on land, which
is a different feeling than just
a pure sky view where you're
disoriented a bit by the view.
Remember, I mentioned that most
of these artists--
so here's Dahl who's Norwegian,
but he's coming all the way
south to Italy.
So one of the things that you
need to pay attention to
in this exhibition
is all
of the different nationalities
of the artists, Swedish,
Norwegian, German, French,
American.
And they're all coming
towards Rome.
They're fascinated by the Roman
Campagna.
They're going out.
And then they're moving even
further south.
So from Rome, they go down
towards Naples,
they paint Vesuvius.
They go into Calabria,
they paint the ruins at Paestum,
places like that.
Then they even cross over
into Sicily.
Another volcano in Sicily
is Mount Etna.
This whole subject
of the volcano, especially
at this point in time,
especially in the Victorian era,
coming back to Bulwer-Lytton,
the book you may know by him,
maybe his most famous book
is not Paul Clifford,
it's The Last Days of Pompeii
from 1843.
We did a big Pompeii show here
several years ago.
And we had the last room almost
dedicated the Bulwer-Lytton
and paintings that came off
of that novel.
For the Victorian, the volcano
was also
interesting in another way.
There's a very rich
iconographic tradition
of portraying volcanoes
in Victorian painting,
in late 19th century painting.
And especially in England
in the Victorian era,
the volcano was seen as symbolic
of our own--
Again, it was kind of like--
I can't remember the phrase that
writer used about Bronte,
but psycho-meteorology.
In other words, for example, it
wasn't really
appropriate for a man
and a woman
to look at a painting
of a volcano erupting together
because it had implications.
I don't think I need to lay this
out for you anymore.
But it had other aspects to it.
And especially in sort
of tight, buttoned-up Victorian
society where everybody is
repressing everything,
the volcano was seen
as something that could be
potentially rather dangerous.
So that's why we often see lots
of volcanoes by artists.
Another artist in the exhibition
who is quite talented
is another German.
This is Carl Gustav Carus.
This is Peaks in the Clouds
on the left, which
is in a private collection
in Switzerland.
A number of the works
in the show
come from private collections.
And a Carus work on the right,
Morning Fog from 1825.
The one on the left
is oil on paper.
The one on the right
is a watercolor on paper.
That's from the Alte
Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Carus is a German.
He's one of these Renaissance
men.
He's a physiologist.
He's a painter.
He's a doctor.
He's a naturalist.
He's a scientist.
He was a psychologist.
I mean, he wore many hats.
And he actually studied briefly
under Caspar David Friedrich.
So he actually studied
under Friedrich early
in his career.
He travels pretty widely
and gives us again
these beautiful views,
especially of clouds over peaks,
mountain peaks.
This becomes another subcategory
almost.
It's one thing to show clouds.
It's one thing to show clouds
over a landscape that's just
a level landscape.
But clouds
over these great peaks,
especially in the Alps where
they create again
their own weather system when
it's in the mountains and things
like that, this becomes very
attractive.
This is something that John
Ruskin was particularly
attracted to.
We'll talk more about Ruskin
as we get along.
Certainly paintings of dawn
and dusk, those two times of day
are particularly
attractive to all
of these artists.
Here on the left,
another Danish artist.
This is Johann Thomas Lundbye,
Clouds Heavy with Rain, Clouds
Heavy with Rain.
It's above a particular
landscape that I literally
cannot pronounce.
It's a Danish word that has
about 12 consonants in it.
So just remember Clouds Heavy
with Rain from 1838.
This comes from the Morgan
Library on the left.
And then he's Danish,
but the guy on the right
is Norwegian.
That's Thomas Fearnley, Sunset
Sorrento, 1834.
I can pronounce "Sorrento."
So you see again Sorrento going
south to the Amalfi Coast
on the right.
Fearnley is very interesting,
the painter who painted
the sunset on the right.
He is a disciple and a student
of Johan Christian Dahl
and he is particularly
attentive to the role of light
in his studies.
You see these artists,
they start sort of-- you
can see their interest go in one
place or another.
Some are more
interested in the cloud
formations.
Some of them
are interested in light.
Some are interested in dusk.
Some are interested in dawn.
You can start to sort of pick
out their predilections.
He writes on this drawing,
literally the place and time
it's written, Sorrento, May 22,
1834.
Dahl, who was his teacher,
Johan Christian Dahl thought
that Fearnley's
open-air sketches were the best
things that he created.
He even wrote at one point
describing them as quote,
"better
than his finished paintings,
for in them he gave
of his true self as he was
and as he felt when face to face
with nature."
This idea of "face to face
with nature" is actually quite
significant.
Because when you paint
in the open air, not
in your studio,
and when you're directly
confronting nature,
that is a relationship.
And for many artists,
that was a new relationship,
to literally go outside and look
and have a direct kind
of reaction-response,
a direct visual challenge
to you.
So we sort of take it
for granted today.
We don't think much about it.
But it actually
is a particularly important idea
in itself.
The French painter Valenciennes,
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
is important.
These are two works
by Valenciennes.
Study of Clouds over the Roman
Campagna on the left, 1782
to '85, this is actually
in our permanent collection.
It's in the show, but we own it.
It's an oil on paper, and then
transferred to cardboard.
And on the right, A View
of Rome, 1782 to '85.
Valenciennes is important
because he writes a treatise.
It's sort of like a manual, sort
of a guide-- well, yeah,
a treatise in which he gives
instructions to artists
about how to work
in the open air.
And this was a pretty well read
book.
He tells them to always start
with the sky.
When you go outside,
the first thing you want
to start-- you
don't want to start
with the land.
You want to start with the sky.
That's going to determine
your palate.
And that's probably going
to determine
your overall composition as
well.
And then he stresses something
that also John Ruskin,
we'll talk about later,
and that is you should work
quickly.
You should come, sit, look,
start to work, and you should
not do anything-- it shouldn't
take anything-- nothing should
take longer than two hours.
And once you kind of lose
the memory,
you're losing the image
in your head, you should stop.
Because the effects are
changing.
So this is pretty good advice.
And many artists sort of
work in that particular fashion.
Normally, if I'm talking
about impressionism, you know,
you have to talk
about certain things.
And so I've brought back
some things that are
relevant to this discussion,
even though we're long
before the French
impressionists.
And that is if you're going
to start painting
in the open air,
it sets in motion a series
of just
simple practical elements
that you have to deal with.
I have to take my paints
outside.
I have to sit on something.
I have to have some kind
of support
for my work, et cetera.
So in a very encapsulated way
here, one of the reasons you
could work outside
is because ultimately paints
will be produced in metal tubes.
But before that,
and relevant in fact to some
of the paintings we're talking
about, for example Constable,
the earliest tradition
of packaging your paints so
that you can take them out
outside were in pig bladders.
So to the far left,
you see these little bladders.
Usually they were a pig bladder.
And you would put your paint
in there.
Then you'd have
a little thumbtack
or a little tack that would
close the top of it.
When you're outside though,
as soon as you open up
that bladder
and start painting it,
it's going to get dry pretty
quickly.
The next development was
towards carrying paint in what
we would call today
a sort of syringe tube.
It acted like a syringe.
You could push the paint out.
But those weren't particularly
airtight either.
And then as you just move across
on this chart to the right,
of course, the metal paint tube
is where things then become
really efficient and effective
and easy to work with.
But even more than the paint
tube, it was the screw cap.
That's important, that you could
close the tube with a screw cap
that would keep it very
airtight.
So here we have kind
of a brief overview
from the bladder
to the metal tube with a screw
cap.
OK, you still had to have
some kind of support.
Here's a much later painting
by John Singer Sargent that
shows Monet Painting by the Edge
of a Wood in 1885.
And what he is using here
to support his picture now
the guys
that we're talking
about for this exhibition,
they're painting very small
things that are about the size
of a sheet of notebook paper.
So they didn't really need
an easel.
But in terms of painting
on a larger scale, the invention
of the French box
easel, an easel that could be
broken down.
It had telescoping legs.
And when it was all closed down,
you could carry it
like a briefcase.
So now you had your paint
in tubes,
you had your portable easel.
And then ultimately, certainly
for the impressionists
and for Barbizon painters,
you still had to get somewhere.
And one of the great revolutions
is a very practical one--
sometimes the history of art
moves ahead simply because
of science
and technological things--
the development of the railway.
So here you see the railway
system on the left in Paris
in and around France at around
1860.
And then I'm just showing you
on the right some of those very
famous locations
you're all familiar with where
the Impressionists went out
to paint.
So with the railway,
that meant you could get up
in the morning in Paris.
You could have your little box
easel, your paints and tubes,
and your knapsack, pack a lunch,
get on the train in the morning,
go out somewhere to paint out
in the outskirts in the suburbs,
paint all day, and then get back
on the train
and be back in Paris for dinner.
So that changed a lot of things.
Now, I made reference
to the scientific treatises.
And there are some that are more
important than others.
I've already alluded to the one
by Luke Howard which you see
here on the upper left.
I just want to call these
to your attention.
We're not necessarily going
to go through them in depth.
But one of the most important
is the book that I mentioned
already called Essay
on the Modification of Clouds
written by a British pharmacist
Luke Howard.
And that was published in 1803.
And you see that one up there
on the upper left.
As I mentioned to you,
it's Howard who sets
out the classification system
of clouds that we use today.
He gives them their Latin names
that we still use, cirrus,
stratus, cumulus, nimbus.
Those are words, by the way,
in English that you would
translate as curl, layer, mass,
rain.
That's how those would
translate.
My favorite-- slightly
different, it's not so much
about the clouds, it's about
the winds--
is this one here.
And that's the famous Beaufort
Scale created in 1805 by Francis
Beaufort who was an Admiral
in the Navy.
But he was an Irish hydrographer
as well.
And what he was concerned with,
especially from the point
of view of being in the Navy,
was trying to standardize
descriptions of wind.
You might tell me
it's breezy out.
And then I would go out
and I would be knocked over.
And I would say, gee, that's not
a breeze, that's a gale.
And there was no standard way
of referring to wind speed.
So one person's breeze
was another person's wind
was another person's gale.
And so what he attempted to do
was to standardize wind speed,
so we would all use
the same vocabulary,
and then what that wind speed
would do on land
and what that wind speed would
do if you were at sea.
And he comes up with a chart
that I'll talk about
in a second.
But let's go on for the moment.
In 1815 up here we have the book
by Thomas Foster.
This was a book that greatly
influenced Constable.
It's Researches
about Atmospheric Phenomena.
And this was, in essence,
another kind
of systematic classification
of clouds, for the most part.
And then a person
who is of great significance--
it's hard to kind of just brush
by this guy because he casts
a huge shadow--
is John Ruskin.
The lower right I'm showing you
the work that is among his most
important, Modern Painters,
which ran to five volumes
and was published between 1843
and 1860.
But when Ruskin was even
a young man, for example,
he gave his first lecture
at the age of 18
on the present state
of meteorological science.
And that was in 1839.
Modern Painters comes out
in 1884.
Later in his life, he comes back
and gives a series of lectures
at the London Institute
that are titled The Storm
Cloud of the 19th Century.
So these are in 1884.
Now that term storm cloud
is interesting.
Because what Ruskin talks
about in those
lectures when he uses the term
storm cloud, it's actually
not a cloud that's
a stormy cloud.
He's talking about pollution.
He's now talking about the storm
cloud
that is beginning to engulf
England and the continent
because of the burning of coal
and that this is a storm cloud.
And you'll see Turner
and others, and I'll show you
an example a little later, where
you'll see a painting or drawing
that will have like a church
steeple on one side
and it'll have smokestacks
on the other side belching out
smoke.
So Ruskin is already ahead
of the curve in terms of climate
science, the effects
of pollution.
So he refers in that lecture
to this idea of the storm cloud
which he calls,
and he was specifically talking
about the city of Manchester,
this great industrial city,
he called it Manchester "devil's
darkness."
And very often when you see him
use this word devil,
he's talking about pollution
in his writing.
So he is very important.
And we'll come back to Ruskin.
Here's Beaufort.
This is a portrait of Beaufort
on the left by Steven Pearce.
Rear Admiral Sir Francis
Beaufort on the left from 1855
to '56.
And that is the Beaufort Scale
on the right-- you can find this
anywhere--
in which he then laid out
these sort of categories of wind
speeds.
As I said, some somebody's
stiff breeze might be
another person's soft breeze.
And he tries to sort of
standardize all this.
Now, I have to just tell
a personal story here.
About eight or nine years ago, I
went to the Shakespeare Theater
to see a performance by Sir Ian
McKellen.
And it was when he was doing
this one person show.
He would just go around and talk
about his life and his career
and all of that.
It was absolutely
hypnotic and mesmerizing.
And at one point what he did,
and this is apparently something
he had done in his life
earlier as an actor,
he read, or shall we say
he performed, the Beaufort scale
as if it was a narrative.
So he took the actual chart,
which I have it right in front
of me.
And you can see there.
And there is a number 0
through 12.
And then there's the name
of the wind, calm, light air,
light breeze, gentle breeze,
and then the speeds
and then the effects observed
far from land, the effects
observed on the land, et cetera.
And he just read it.
But he read it
like a dramatic text.
So he would start and he would
say--
I'm not Sir Ian McKellen,
but you'll get the idea-- he
would say, calm, calm.
Smoke rises vertically.
Seas like a mirror.
Light air, ripples
with appearances of scales.
No foam crests.
Direction of wind shown by smoke
drift.
And then he just went down
the chart until he would get to,
strong gale, slight structural
damage occurs.
Chimney pots and slate removed.
High sea, sea begins to roll.
And then he'd go down
and finally he gets to 12
and he would shout, hurricane!
Air filled with foam.
And he would just go on
and on and on.
I tell this to you
because, first of all,
the performance was magnificent.
But you can actually find this
on YouTube.
It's been recorded probably 100
times.
It's so famous.
So if you want to hear
his performance, I'm not sure
when it was done.
Just go to YouTube and type
in "Sir Ian McKellen," "Beaufort
Scale," and you'll get
that evening that I had
at the Shakespeare Theater.
Now, the science of clouds, so
here our modern clouds.
These are our modern clouds
the way meteorologists think
of them.
There are high clouds, which are
cirrus, cirrostratus,
cirrocumulus.
And each of these
is
indicative of a particular
potential weather pattern.
So a meteorologist will
for a cirrus normally it's
a change might be on its way
in the weather.
If it's a cirrostratus,
it could be rain or snow will
arrive within 24 hours.
If it's cirrocumulus,
it's going to be fair,
but possibly cold.
However, if you live
in a tropical region
this could mean that a hurricane
might be approaching.
Those are high level clouds.
Mid-level-- the altocumulus,
the altostratus,
the nimbostratus.
So fair, altocumulus
is associated with fair weather.
Altostratus-- be prepared
for continuous rain or snow.
Nimbostratus-- gloomy
with continuous rain or snow.
And then low lying clouds,
and these are especially
the clouds that most
of these artists
were kind of riveted on.
Cumulus, the prediction normally
is fair weather.
Stratus-- fair but gloomy.
Cumulonimbus-- look out
for rain.
Could be hail.
And the bottom one,
stratocumulus-- fair weather
for now, but a storm might be
on its way.
So this is the way we think
of clouds today.
That terminology goes back
to Luke Howard.
It goes back
to the 19th century.
And the artist though who
is at the core,
the pivotal artist
in this whole discussion,
I think, of cloud studies
is the English artist Constable.
John Constable sits right
at the nexus
of this whole discussion.
This is
our great, great painting
Wivenhoe Park,
Essex on the left from 1816
and then a cloud study
that we own at the gallery
that's in the exhibition Cloud
Study--
Stormy Sunset, 1821 to '22.
So these are both works
in our permanent collection.
Constable produced over 100
that we know of, over 100
sketches of the sky
in the open air, en plein air.
And he called this exercise,
he gave a term to it,
he had a term for it-- skying.
He would tell people,
"I'm going out skying."
And that meant he was gonna
go out and sit down somewhere
outside
and look up at the clouds
and do these pure cloud studies
in oil,
most often omitting the horizon
entirely.
He's looking just right
up into the air without any kind
of orientation of landscape.
Sometimes we'll see a few here
and there.
But then he makes this series
of notations
on most of these drawings,
usually on the backsides
of the drawings.
He will note the season,
the time of day,
the wind direction, the weather
conditions, sometimes
the temperature, even
the barometric pressure
in some cases.
He brought all this equipment
out with him as well.
So he really
is interested in the emerging
science of meteorology.
He's really into that.
When he reads Luke Howard,
he finds that very, very
interesting.
These are again works not
conceived for the public.
They're not meant to be
exhibited.
They're works
for his own purposes.
What he is accumulating
with these cloud studies
is a kind of, what I call
a Rolodex of cloud studies
that he can have in his studio.
And he has all these notations
on the back.
So when he actually is painting
a painting in his studio
and he wants a particular effect
of sky or something or cloud,
he can flip through these
and he can look at the back
and remember, oh yes, this was
a good humid day and the clouds
looked like this, et cetera.
So he had a kind of built
in reference.
Here's the great painting
The Hay Wain from 1821
on the left.
And then Sky Study with a Shaft
of Sunlight on the right
from 1822, this is, I think,
in the exhibition.
It's from the Fitzwilliam
in Cambridge.
His painting of clouds
is based on the same locations.
He painted almost everything
in Suffolk near Flatford
on the Stour River.
The Hay Wain, of course,
is a remarkably important
painting because of when it was
exhibited in France at the 1824
Paris Salon.
Jericho and Delacroix saw
this picture and they really had
their first encounter
with the incredible effects
of atmosphere
in terms of the clouds that
touched both Jericho
and Delacroix.
And also the use of the color
green--
Delacroix was amazed
that the number of shades
of green in this picture.
He was just going
on and on about, you know, there
are like fifty shades of green
in this picture.
So all of that brought Constable
to the attention
of French painters,
the French romantics.
This is a beautiful study
on the right with a shaft
of sunlight.
These studies by Constable
are breathtakingly beautiful,
for the most part.
Here's Rainstorm Over the Sea
from 1824 to '28 on the left
from the Royal Academy
in London.
And the Study of a Cloudy Sky
on the right from 1825.
Here, he gives us in both cases
here, he's giving us land.
That's really the exception
to the rule, Study of a Cloudy
Sky on the right.
The painting on the right
comes from the Yale Center
for British Art.
Of course, that's the collection
that was essentially created
by Paul Mellon, who was
a great lover of British art.
Paul Mellon gave us so many
things, but then what he didn't
give to us, especially in terms
of British art
which he had a great love for,
he gave to Yale to set up
this entire museum that is now
the Center for British Art.
Constable read Luke Howard,
but he also read the Foster
book, Researches
about Atmospheric Phenomena
from 1815.
And we have his copy of that
in which he makes notation.
He annotates the whole book.
So as he's going through it,
in the margins he's making
annotations about everything
that Foster is saying
about the way clouds
behave in different conditions.
Here is the kind of notation
he might often make.
So on the left there's A Cloud
Study, Sunset, 1821.
This is from the Yale Center
in New Haven.
It's an oil on paper.
Then it's transferred to a piece
of mill board.
And the backside of it
is what you see on the right
where he has made notations.
I'll read some of those for you
because it's hard for you
to see them.
He jots on the back
of that drawing quote, "Very
lovely evening.
Looking eastward.
Cliffs and light off
a dark gray sky.
Effect and background very
white and golden light."
Those are notations that he
makes on that drawing.
In that same year, 1821,
he wrote a letter to a friend
about this whole idea of skying.
And he says to his friend quote,
"I have done a great deal
of skying.
That Landscape painter who does
not make his sky a very material
part of his composition
neglects to avail himself of one
of his greatest aides.
It will be difficult to name
a class of landscape in which
the sky is not the key note,
the standard of scale,
and the chief organ
of sentiment."
So he is telling us right
off the importance of the sky.
Valenciennes would have agreed
with all of that, that
French artist I mentioned.
Here is Cloud Study from 1821
on the left.
And again, where he gives you
a little bit of tree
on the right, Cloud Study,
Hampstead, Tree at Right, 11
September 1821, that's
the title.
That's at the Royal Academy
in London on the right.
The one on the left is at Yale.
Constable kept notations,
aphorisms, kept his thoughts.
And he collected them in what we
would call today the discourses,
somewhat like with Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
And in his discourses,
Constable wrote quote, "Nature
is never seen in this climate,
at least, to greater perfection
than at about 9:00
in the mornings of July
and August
when the sun has gained
sufficient strength to give
splendor to the landscape.
Still gemmed with the morning
dew without its oppressive heat
and it is still more delightful
if vegetation has been refreshed
with a shower during the night."
So he's saying this is the best
time to go out looking
this month, this time,
et cetera.
This painting on the right sort
of almost beautifully
typifies
this particular sentiment.
And that painting on the right
is inscribed on the back
with the following notations.
It says, "Hampstead, 11
September 1821.
10:00 to 11:00, morning,
under the sun.
Clouds silvery
gray on warm ground.
Sultry, light wind
to the southwest.
Fine all day,
but rain in the night
following."
And I'll show you what that
looks like, that inscription.
There it is.
So that's in his own hand
on the back of that drawing.
Sometimes his drawings
do incorporate land
and sometimes they incorporate
sea.
And one of the greatest
and richest and densest and most
experimental is this one.
This is from Yale.
Stormy Sea, Brighton, 1828.
We think of Gustave Courbet
as the great master
of the palette knife
and these thickly encrusted
seascapes.
And we have a couple of examples
that I'll show you later.
But certainly Constable could
have these richly encrusted,
very active surfaces as well.
By the way, I mean,
you're looking at this thing
gigantic.
So you have to think,
this is about the size
of a sheet of notebook paper.
Here is a study on the left,
Salisbury Cathedral
from the Meadows from 1829.
And that is a study
for the painting
on the right, same title,
Salisbury Cathedral
from the Meadows
exhibited in 1831.
These are both at the Tate
in London.
Now this study on the left
can fool you.
I just mentioned most of these
are notebook-sized.
But this one is not.
This study is two feet by one
and a half feet.
So that's a big one on the left.
And it is a study
for the painting on the right.
A lot has been written here
about the changes from the study
to the finished painting, most
notably
the darkening and threatening
sky, or at least the storm
again,
passing, the rainbow coming out,
even though it would be almost
impossible for a rainbow
to appear
at this particular moment
in the sky.
So he's taking liberties here.
He's clearly taking liberties
here.
He's not being that empirical.
And in fact, once you know
this landscape and this setting
and where this rainbow is
falling, it's falling
on the house
of the Anglican minister who had
gotten him through a kind
of spiritual crisis
at this time.
So it actually again has a kind
of deeper symbolic relationship
to his life
here than most of these had.
This painting on the right he
never found a buyer for.
He kept it in his studio
for his entire life.
He continued to touch it up all
the way up until his death.
It is a large picture.
It's a 5 by 6 feet.
You may recall, I mentioned
a couple of exhibitions we've
done here, the Turner show.
But several years ago, we did
the great Constable show where
we had the six footers.
Constable used to work
on a sketch that was six feet,
comparable in size and scale,
one to one ratio to the finished
painting.
And they had never been brought
together at the same time.
And in that exhibition that we
did, we brought them together
so you could see the six foot
sketch against the six foot
painting.
You could probably still find
this on our web site.
When you look at our Constable,
The White Horse, that's a six
foot painting, right?
That's a sketch.
The finished painting
is in the Frick.
So those two would go together.
Now I mentioned going out
and setting up shop.
Here is Constable's paint box
on the left that's kept
at the Tate from 1837.
And you can see again
the bladders here of the paint,
here other material.
And then when we talk
about a sketch box,
that's what you see
on the right.
And that is one of Constable's
wooden sketch boxes.
That's what you would use
as your support.
You would close the box,
put it on your lap,
and then tack your paper
to the top of the sketch box.
And that would serve
as your kind of support.
Constable did not like to paint
in gardens.
He thought that whole thing was,
that's just silly.
And he talked about gardens.
He said quote, "A gentleman's
park is my aversion.
It is not beauty because it is
not nature."
And even an English garden
compared to a French garden,
an English garden
would have been more sort
of wild and would grow.
But still to him that
was a whole artificial concept.
Here is Constable's paint box
again.
It's
without that little white sheet
of paper that was
in the previous image.
You can see the bladders.
On the right, that is not
Constable's paint box,
that's Turner's paint box.
That was found in his studio
after his death in 1851.
These are kept at the Tate
gallery.
We also have Turner's palette
here on the left.
And that's always interesting
because you can see the colors
that are on the palette.
So when conservators did
an analysis of the palette
and about
what was the color range
he was using.
And we have
cobalt blue, emerald green,
veridian, orange vermilion,
barium chromate, which
is a source for yellow.
And on the right what they found
in his studio as well,
Turner's studio,
were all of these test tubes
with dry pigments.
There were over 60 that they
found after his death.
And these were the dry pigments
that he would then use to make
his paint.
That brings us to Turner
and to two of our great Turners
that I've spoken
about in the past--
The Junction of the Thames
and the Medway, on the left,
from 1807, and The Approach
to Venice, on the right,
from 1844.
Turner and Ruskin are very
important together.
And I'm going to come back
to Ruskin in a few minutes.
But the painting on the left
is this sort of stormy scene.
It's not derived
from any biblical
or historical or mythological
story.
It's the depiction of storm
at sea, these ships that are
floundering at the estuary where
the Thames and the Medway meet.
There's a lot of manipulation
in this painting that
is against nature.
Where the light is, where
the sun is, there's no way
it could be shining
on those sails
based on where it is
behind the clouds,
all of this kind of stuff.
He's taking a lot of liberties.
So he is going
for a grander kind of effect.
But that sky in that painting
by Turner is influenced
by our painting of Rembrandt's
Mill.
This was the time that painting
of the mill was in London.
And Turner saw that picture
in real life.
And so it has an influence
on Turner's skies,
especially where there is
a storm that's kind of passing.
The painting on the right
was a painting John Ruskin
loved.
And he called it, at one point,
he wrote about it saying that it
was quote, "The most perfectly
beautiful piece of color of all
that I have seen
produced by human hands."
That's quite a statement
from Ruskin.
So we have sort of two
different things here.
Turner ends up almost creating
purely abstracted landscapes
of sunlight, atmosphere, color,
and brush stroke.
And the painting on the left
is still Turner kind of looking
at the Dutch.
So the difference between Turner
in 1807 on the left
and Turner in 1844 on the right,
he has traveled
a great distance.
Here is Turner's painting
on the left, again, one
of these long titles,
Snow Storm--
Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
making Signals in Shallow
Water--
that's the whole title--
from 1842.
And I brought a painting in that
we own.
This is Turner's Evening
of the Deluge, on the right,
from the National Gallery
from 1843.
That painting, if you recall,
those two paintings I mentioned
that were influenced by Goethe's
theory of color, remember those?
Our painting is probably
the first tune up, shall we say,
for the painting
that Turner did that was
that one that was the hotter
colors.
So our deluge probably relates
to that painting
by Turner that becomes part
of that pair that explore
Goethe's theory.
If we take a little journey
to Belgium, this is Jean-Michel
Cels--
he's in the [? exhibit, ?]
C-E-L-S--
Clouds Study on the left
from 1838 to '42, Sky Study
with Birds, 1842.
Cels is an important painter.
He comes from Belgium.
He actually is the son
of a relatively well-known
Belgian neoclassical painter.
But his father introduces
his son to going outside
to do oil sketches.
We don't know that much
about his life.
But he produces a really
wonderful body of these cloud
studies.
It's interesting when you add
something like birds
into the sky.
They're so small,
but it does change the feeling.
When there's a human presence
or an animal presence
or something, or even again
if there's a tree or something,
it changes the whole feeling
of the work.
Here is Johann Jakob Frey.
He's Swiss.
Again, just note
these nationalities.
They're from everywhere,
Belgium, Switzerland.
This is Sun Breaking
Through the Clouds
above the Roman Campagna,
on the left, from 1844,
oil on paper from the National
Gallery.
We own that painting.
And then Frey's Sunset, 1840,
on the right.
It's in a private collection.
Frey is Swiss,
but he's part of this migration
of artists to Rome
and then moving southward
through the Roman peninsula,
past Naples
into Calabria, ultimately
into Sicily.
And in fact, Frey travels
ultimately to Egypt
and to Ethiopia.
He goes back to Italy.
He dies in Frascati just outside
of Rome.
Let's come back for a moment
to Thomas Cole,
in a different vein.
I showed you The Voyage of Life,
two of the paintings.
But this is a Thomas Cole
drawing here on the left.
It's titled Atmospheric Study
with Notations from 1825.
It's at the Detroit Institute
of Arts.
And this is a very important
work.
Because Cole studied
and sketched and painted
clouds
throughout his entire life.
From the earliest days,
he was interested in the science
of clouds.
Even if he often used
those skies in a more
symbolic way
as he does with the voyage
of life, he was influenced
by another book.
It wasn't so much
a meteorological text.
It was a book called Precepts
and Observations on the Art
of Coloring
in Landscape Painting from 1810.
1810 is the same year Goethe
produces his theory.
1810 was interesting.
There were a number
of important treatises.
On this atmospheric notation,
he makes all kinds of notations
of the shades of the clouds,
the shape, the colors, what's
happening as they come
through this valley.
And at one point, he inscribes
on that the phrase "thunderstorm
after sunset."
One of the paintings that Cole
could never forget
was the painting on the right
by Constable.
When Cole traveled to London,
he was in London from 1829
to '31, he actually went
into the studios.
He was admitted to the studios
of both Turner and Constable.
And in Constable's studio,
he saw Hadley Castle.
That's the painting
on the right, one of Constable's
greatest pictures from 1829.
And he could not forget that sky
in Hadley Castle.
That sky will be reworked,
rechanneled in Cole's paintings
over and over again.
That painting is magnificent.
We had it in our Constable show.
And it was really something
to see.
Now this is Cole, and one
of his, arguably,
his most famous painting,
perhaps, which has a long title
that we never use
in its entirety--
The View from Mount Holyoke,
North Hampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm.
But the title we always call it
because it's easier,
The Oxbow from 1836.
This is the great [? Cole. ?]
It's at the Met, New York.
And that's just the detail
over here of the sky right
in this area.
So this is the detail
of the clouds in the bigger
painting.
Cole took his cloud studies just
like Constable did, and then
incorporated them
into his larger pictures.
But in fact, the inspiration
for The Oxbow,
for this whole sky scene here
is actually not Constable,
it's Turner.
It's Turner's Snow Storm,
the painting I showed you
with Hannibal, the army
of Hannibal crossing the Alps.
That's a painting Cole saw
in Turner's studio.
And he actually lifted the sky,
pretty much,
for his own painting.
Here is a cloud study by Cole
on the left, Clouds, 1830s.
This is also at the Met.
So that's a straight cloud study
on the left.
What I'm showing you
on the right is not a painting
by Cole.
It's a painting by his greatest
student, Frederic Church.
And that's Sunset
Across the Hudson Valley
on the right from 1870.
Cole, he did eventually master,
much like Constable, the cloud
study.
And he passes that interest
onto Church.
I started this talk
with a painting by Church
from [? Maine. ?]
Cole and Church had almost
a father-son relationship.
Church idolized Cole.
He was like a father to him.
And in fact, in this picture
here,
when you look across the Hudson
to the other side, he's actually
painting the location where
Thomas Cole had his house.
When Church built
his great house at Olana,
he built it so that he could see
Cole's house across the Hudson
as a constant kind of homage
to his great teacher.
So both of these artists
in American painting,
Church and Cole became
great exponents of cloud
pictures and cloud studies.
Just heading back
to the continent, a work that's
in the show, this is a painter
right from France, Isabey,
Eugene Isabey,
Fishing Boats Tossed
before a Storm, 1840,
and another Frenchman Lebas,
Gabriel Lebas, he's in the show,
A Rocky Seacoast in a Storm
from the 1840s.
France has
its own interesting history.
And we can go back
into our permanent collection
and start to talk briefly
about the painters
that we've come to call
the Barbizon
school at Fontainebleau.
This is our great Troyon
painting on the left, Constant
Troyon, The Approaching Storm
from 1849 is a large painting.
And then a smaller oil paint
and black chalk
on charcoal painting
on the right by Troyon.
It's also in our collection,
A Windmill against a Cloudy Sky.
Troyon is one of the leading
painters of what we will come
to call the Barbizon movement,
prior
to the French impressionists
when these artists begin to move
outside of Paris.
This is another exhibition
we did a number of years ago,
the school of Fontainebleau,
which had been the hunting
grounds for the kings
in the past, the French kings.
And they begin to move out
into Barbison to paint
in the open air
and to paint landscapes.
The Approaching Storm
on the left
is one of the great paintings
by Troyon
that really is an homage
in some ways to Constable.
Certainly, again, he was
thinking often of Constable
in these pictures.
Here is one
of the other great Barbizon
painters in our collection.
This is Theodore Rousseau,
Landscape with a Stormy Sky
on the left.
That's in the exhibition.
That's oil.
It's a small painting
from the Victoria and Albert.
And then our great painting that
came to us through the Corcoran
collection on the right
After the Rain from 1850.
Rousseau and Troyon are two
of the great, most famous,
and most important
of the open-air painters that
will paint in Barbizon.
Now we do have to say something
about this guy.
Because he has
cast a huge shadow
over the 19th century.
He's so important.
That's John Ruskin.
So this is a portrait of Ruskin
on the left from 1843.
It's a print,
but after a painting by George
Richmond.
And then on the right
is a photograph of Ruskin
as a young man from 1859.
Last year 2019 was
the 200th anniversary
of Ruskin's birth.
There were
celebrations
all across the world of Ruskin,
especially obviously in England.
Ruskin is hard to sort of just
summarize.
He is the son
of a prosperous wine shipper.
He was born in London.
His childhood could not have
been more privileged and more
devoted to his education.
His father John James Ruskin
imbued his son with a love
of romanticism,
with romantic literature,
with the works of Byron
and Shakespeare,
Sir Walter Scott.
His mother Margaret was
an evangelical Christian who
made him basically learn how
to read by reading
the entire King James
version of the Bible
front to back
and then reading it
a second time after he had
finished.
Ruskin grew up almost being
able to recite by memory
entire chapters of the Bible
that had been so sort
of inculcated into him.
It gave him a love of language,
reading the King James version,
a love of imagery,
a love of storytelling that
would affect his writing
for the rest of his life.
He was essentially home schooled
by his parents.
Occasionally they would bring
in private tutors.
He travels.
His parents make sure that he
travels.
His father takes him
on these literary pilgrimages,
for example,
to see all the various sites
that were important to a writer
like Sir Walter Scott.
Here is Ruskin in 1863
on the left from the National
Portrait Gallery in London.
The photograph on the right
a later photograph from 1885.
Ruskin is, without a doubt,
the most influential art
theorist of the 19th century.
There's nobody who comes close.
Baudelaire is
important in France
without a doubt.
But Ruskin-- the importance
of Ruskin, the clout that Ruskin
will have, the ideas of Ruskin
just really do tower over almost
everybody else
in the 19th century.
He is impressed by the work
of Turner and almost
single-handedly brings Turner
to the sort of admiration
of a broad public in Modern
Painters.
Modern Painters, it's five
volumes.
And most of it
is devoted to singing
the praises of Turner
and clouds, both
of those things.
When you look at Ruskin's
collected works,
if you go to a library, not
the internet,
and you're actually looking
at books on a shelf,
there is one collected edition
that everybody reads,
edited by two men, Alexander
and Wedderburn.
And it runs to 39 volumes.
Each volume is the size
of an encyclopedia.
The index runs to 688 pages.
And the index is double columns,
688 pages, double columns,
39 volumes.
Ruskin is the man who literally
saves the pre-Raphaelite when he
defends them in 1848.
Ruskin's writings are--
I mean, what can I say?
You have to read them.
Some people hate Ruskin.
I'm not one of those people.
I really have a great admiration
for Ruskin.
He can certainly
be stuffy and opaque at times.
Clouds were something Ruskin had
a fascination
with his entire life.
He writes passionately
about clouds in Modern Painters.
In Modern Painters, he declares
that the sky is quote, "Almost
human in its passions, almost
spiritual in its tenderness,
almost divine in its infinity."
He described himself as a sort
of a cloud worshipper.
He was an artist.
This is a Ruskin drawing
on the left, a Study of Gneiss
Rock from 1853.
This is where you can see why
the pre-Raphaelites were sort of
supported by Ruskin
because Ruskin urged any artist
to, much like we were talking
about with Leonardo,
to use your eye.
Look, look, and look again,
and look closely.
And take your time
and look again.
And the closer the better.
So when you look at all
those pre-Raphaelite paintings
of little bird's nest
and things and every little twig
is painted and every little spot
on the robin egg and all
of that, that's Ruskin.
And then the question that
usually befuddles people, OK,
if he could support that,
how can he support Turner,
Turner's sort of deluge
and atmospheric sort
of craziness?
Well, for Ruskin they were
both true to nature.
They're just
true to different aspects
of nature.
So he could equally support
the pre-Raphaelites as well
as he could support an artist
of such cataclysmic,
atmospheric effects as somebody
like Turner.
He read Luke Howard's study
again on clouds, everybody did.
And Ruskin himself talks
about three regions of clouds,
the upper region
for cirrus clouds,
the middle region for cumulus,
the lower region for nimbus.
This guy, if you can have a love
affair with a cirrus cloud,
this guy did.
He writes page after page
after page about how
perfect cirrus clouds are.
He describes them at one point
that they are quote,
"Motionless, multitudinous lines
of delicate vapor."
He goes on to say that they
have, quote, "Narrow extremity,
invariably turned to the wind,
and the fibers are parallel
with its direction."
And that's just part
of this kind of love affair
with the cirrus cloud.
Where you see this is if you go
to Modern Painters.
What I'm showing you here
on the left is an illustration
from Modern Painters that was
based on a drawing by Ruskin.
Ruskin did a drawing and then
it was turned
into an illustration
to be printed in the volume five
of Modern Painters this is
called Cloud-Flocks,
Cloud-Flocks.
It's Cirrus clouds.
On the right, again from Modern
Painters, again based
on a drawing that's been turned
into an illustration, the Venga
Medusa.
"Venga medusa" is a term
to describe a mountain peak
in the Alps.
And here's that idea of how
the clouds relate to the peaks
of mountains.
Ruskin called this mountain,
in fact he named this mountain
the Venga Medusa.
That comes from Dante.
And he described it as, quote
"The most terrible, she
is essentially the highest storm
cloud, therefore the hail cloud
or cloud of cold.
Her countenance turning all who
behold it to stone."
So the Medusa, this cloud
is like a Medusa.
You look at it,
it's so terrible you turn
to stone.
One writer on Ruskin
and this topic of weather
and clouds
called this an example
of the grotesque sublime.
Because he's
so graphic about how
he sees this.
Ruskin is incredibly
important as a teacher, his idea
of pedagogy.
He had many students
through various institutions
he was affiliated with.
And he required his students
to always undertake
a daily period of going out
into the open air,
taking weather observations,
and recording these weather
observations in their notebooks.
This is a Turner engraving.
It's a Turner drawing that's
then engraved here
on the left titled Coventry.
And this is produced
for the book of Turner
illustrations called
Picturesque Views in England
and Wales.
Before Turner is the Turner
that we know,
Turner was an artist who was
what we call
a picturesque artist,
a topographical artist.
He went out and actually
recorded
certain specific topographical
places and views.
These were compiled into a book,
this one about England
and Wales.
So this is Coventry on the left.
Here, for example, you see
something I mentioned
a long time ago,
some church steeples and some
billowing stacks here
from these factories, here,
this kind of juxtaposition.
Turner was certainly reading
Ruskin there's no question
about that.
On the right is a Ruskin
drawing.
That's Ruskin, Light
in the West, Beauvais, 1854.
This would also be later
engraved and would appear
in Modern Painters.
But that is the original drawing
by Ruskin on the right.
Here is a Turner drawing,
a watercolor, Long Ship's
Lighthouse, Land's End
on the left by Turner.
And then on the right
is another one
of these engravings
after a drawing by Turner,
Stonehenge from 18--
again this was meant
for those picturesque views
of England and Wales.
This drawing on the right,
the drawing and then
the subsequent engraving
was described by one critic
or reviewer of the book
that it appeared as quote,
"All its forms are marked
with violent angles,
as if the whole muscular energy
of the cloud
were arriving in every fold."
There is lightning striking,
as you can see.
Ruskin studied
as an undergraduate
at Christ Church College
at Oxford.
He remained
proud of his connection
to that school
for his entire life,
and Oxford in general.
He helped establish, as a matter
of fact, the University Museum
there at Christchurch College
at Oxford.
He was the first [? lay ?]
professor at Oxford who
delivered a series
of important lectures
every year to the students.
He established the drawing
school at Oxford.
And that's what you're looking
at here on the left,
the classroom.
He organized the school in 1871.
And this was a school not
intended solely for artists.
Anybody could study,
men, women, artists, butchers.
He thought everybody-- this is
very typically Victorian--
He thought everybody should know
how to draw, it didn't matter
what your profession was, didn't
matter what your education level
was.
And he said that that was
important because as a result
you might,
quote, "See greater beauties
than they had hitherto seen
in nature and in art
and thereby gain more pleasure
in life."
He was dedicated to this idea
of a kind of universal education
of drawing again so that, quote,
"So that my pupils may learn
to love nature," unquote.
When he assembled this drawing
school, you see these cabinets
on the right.
They're file cabinets that are
vertical cabinets.
He assembled 1,400 works of art.
Over 100 were works that he
himself had created.
Others were drawings
by other people.
They also created things
like shells and various kinds
of artifacts and objects
that he then put at the disposal
of his students
so that they could learn
from these things,
they could look at these things
and observe and make drawings.
He essentially established,
or at least was instrumental
in the establishment,
ultimately, of a school
of geography.
Geography hadn't even been
thought
of as an actual separate
discipline.
Geology, yes, not geography.
And so he had very much
advocated that his students
study maps, study landscapes,
specifically,
in a kind of geographical sense.
These are some of the drawings
by Ruskin that he included
in his cabinets
for his students to study.
On the left by Ruskin,
Study of Dawn-- the first
Scarlet on Clouds from 1868.
On the right, Study of Dawn--
Purple Clouds from 1868.
These are both at the Ashmolean
at the University of Oxford
today.
He's very much like Constable.
He denotes on the backs of these
exactly where he is, what he's
looking at, what time of day
it is, all of that.
You remember, I mentioned
Valenciennes who had said
that one should work quickly
and all of that.
Ruskin was exactly in agreement.
And he told his students what
is of essence when you work
en plein air is speed.
You have to work quickly.
You have to try to achieve
as quickly as you can
the desired effect of the cloud
as you see it.
It's an exercise partly
in visual memory.
You should start the drawing
in pencil very quickly,
then you can add color
while your memory is still
fresh.
Once your memory begins to fade,
you have to stop.
Don't push it, then just stop.
So he advises his students,
quote, "Rise early.
Always watch the sunrise
and the way the clouds break
from the dawn."
Here's Ruskin's Study of Dawn,
at the left, White Clouds
from 1868.
And Ruskin's Autumnal Cloud
filling the Valley of Geneva
on the right from 1862.
These are both at the Ashmolean.
On the backside of the drawing
at the left,
he writes the following--
"20 March 1868, very quiet,
ended in soft rain."
That's the inscription.
One critic talking
about this drawing
when it was produced
in a catalog of Ruskin's work
described it as "one of the most
beautiful groups of clouds
I ever saw."
This is particularly
interesting.
This painting on the left
is by Turner.
Today this painting is in Ohio.
It is at the Toledo Museum
of Art in Ohio.
It's the Campo Santo, Venice
from 1842.
But that painting was owned
by John Ruskin.
And what Ruskin did on the right
was to do a cloud study
of this part of the painting.
This is a Ruskin drawing
as a cloud study from this part
of the painting
that he owned at that time
and that ultimately found
its way to Toledo.
The drawing is from 1868.
The Turner painting was
from 1842.
His rendering of that cloud
and that whole sort of lifting
from the Turner, Ruskin
described that painting
by Turner which he loved.
And he said, quote, "There is
a bit of blue sky
and cloud by Turner, one
of the loveliest ever painted
by human hand.
But as a mere pattern
of blue and white, he had better
have painted a jay's wing.
This was only painted
and is in reality only pleasant
to you because it signifies
the coming of a gleam
of sweet sunshine
in windy weather.
And the wind is worth thinking
of only because it fills
the sails of ships and the sun
because it warms the sailors."
That's the way Ruskin
approached.
I mean, he's empirical,
but clearly he's imbuing
these clouds with something much
richer and deeper.
Constable's response to Turner
is interesting.
Initially Constable does not
like Turner's paintings.
He's not on board.
But as he matures--
or let's not say as he matures--
as he gets older,
he thinks differently
about Turner.
And later he comes to call
Turner's paintings quote,
"golden visions,
glorious and beautiful.
They are only visions,
but still they are art.
And one could live or die
with such paintings.
He seems to paint
the tinted stream so evanescent
and so airy."
Initially what Constable has
problems with in Turner
is that he seems to be too
atmospheric, too loose, too
lacking in the sort
of empiricism.
But ultimately he comes
to realize that is, in fact,
the greatness of Turner.
Now, who is this guy?
Well, just to sum up,
this is Samuel Palmer.
A painting called Oak Trees,
Lullingstone Park on the left
from 1828.
It's a pen and watercolor.
It's at the National Gallery
of Canada in Ottawa.
And then on the right
is In a Shoreham Garden.
This is one of Palmer's most
famous pictures.
It's at the Victoria and Albert,
In a Shoreham Garden from 1829.
I bring in Palmer because not
everybody liked Ruskin.
Not everybody thought Ruskin was
that hot.
And in the case of Palmer,
he's an artist who, even
though he certainly knew
Ruskin's writings,
feels that what is more
important in a landscape
is the imagination, that you
should bring an imagination
to your landscape pictures.
And what probably turned
the tide towards imagination
for Palmer
was when he met, of all people,
William Blake.
As soon as he met William Blake,
and he met Blake in 1822,
Blake's whole approach to art
was in his head.
It was all about imagination.
Blake was a visionary.
He was hallucinatory.
Some people think he was mad.
But once Palmer discovered
Blake, he changed towards a much
more visionary kind
of landscape.
Blake had famously said at one
point-- there are lots
of great quotes from Blake--
but one of the greatest that I
like is, he said, quote,
"I can look at a knot
and a piece of wood
'til I'm frightened by it."
In other words, he could just
look at a knot and a piece
of wood and his imagination
would turn it into some kind
of monster or something
and he'd end up getting
frightened by it.
So Palmer seems to turn
against Ruskin.
And he writes, probably
with Ruskin in mind,
Palmer wrote in 1875 he said,
quote, "Geological drawing
is not art drawing.
Though the latter includes
as much of it as maybe wanted,
Claude and Poussaint knew what
to omit.
They addressed not
the perception, chiefly,
but the imagination.
And here is the hinge
and essence
of the whole matter."
When he says the imagination is
the hinge and essence
of the whole matter,
that's really somewhat
of a rebuke to Ruskin.
But trust me, you can't get
rid of Ruskin that easily.
This is Palmer late in his life.
And he comes back to maybe have
a rapprochement with Ruskin.
This is Summer Storm
near Pulborough, Sussex
on the left from 1851.
And Harvesting on the right.
This is a painting we own
on the right,
Harvesting from 1851.
These are both watercolors.
You sense when you see Palmer
in the '50s, these are both '51,
that maybe has interest
in the sky
and the clouds
in these pictures, maybe he's
somewhat embracing a slightly
more
naturalistic and empirical
feeling that had come to him
or at least he was
aware of from Ruskin.
In conclusion, Gustave Courbet,
we own these two great pictures,
The Black Rocks at Trouville,
1865, and Calm Sea,
these are both 1865 to '66.
These are paintings, not small.
These are oil on canvas.
In France, Courbet was known
as the painter of landscapes.
And in the 1860s, he's focusing
on these views of the channel
coast up in Normandy.
And he has alongside him
some young painters who are
interested in what he's doing.
One is Eugene Boudin
and the other is Whistler
and the other is Claude Monet.
And they're all with Courbet
along the Normandy coast
where he is experimenting
and looking at weather and light
and atmosphere and the water.
And he's creating
some incredibly great pictures.
Black Rocks at Trouville
is one of his greatest
paintings.
He called these paintings sea
landscapes.
And what he was hoping to do,
and this made an impression
on Monet, was to create a body
of work along the Normandy coast
that would be a series.
So these were meant to be
a series of pictures.
Later Monet would be
famous for his serial imagery.
So Courbet was, in essence,
in some ways giving permission
to these younger painters
in France that it was
OK to paint landscapes
as subject matter,
to paint outside
in the open air,
and to paint in a very
experiential but also very
experimental way.
Courbet is the master
of the palette knife.
And when you look at,
you have to look at these
in the gallery
and you see the way he has
encrusted these rocks
with the palette knife.
They're remarkably important
paintings.
Calm Sea on the right
is a completely different
feeling from the painting
on the left, a different time,
a different day,
a different atmospheric
and weather effect.
And here again thinking back
to what we were talking
about with Friedrich, this kind
of simple striation,
sky, sea, land, these
are very modern paintings
in that regard,
ahead of their time.
Finally, just to end
with a question, can you have
whether in sculpture?
Well, the closest I can get
is this.
We own the sculpture on the left
by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier,
Horseman in a Storm,
from 1878, where you sense
a rider and a horseman trying
to go up against the storm,
the wind that's buffeting them.
They're keeping their heads
down, et cetera, moving
against the storm.
And then in a really remarkable
sculpture that's at the Met, New
York, Winter on the right
from 1787 by Jean Antoine
Houdon.
Here again it's interesting.
When you think of portrayals
of the seasons, spring, summer,
fall, winter, so often they
were allegorical.
You would have old man winter
blowing and this kind of stuff.
But what Houdon gives
us is a woman who is shivering.
She's trying to preserve
her body heat from the cold.
She huddles beneath this kind
of inadequate shawl
that she's wearing.
She's in a chilled state.
And to show winter
as a partially clothed girl
marked a radical departure away
from the more purely allegorical
ways of representing
the seasons.
I know I've kept you well
beyond your limits
and tolerance.
Go see the exhibition.
I think you'll enjoy it.
You'll have a lot of context
now.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
