In the hierarchy of modern European art, codified in Italy in the sixteenth century and modified continuously for the next three hundred years, the genre of landscape was considered a lesser artistic pursuit than depictions of decisive moments of political history or scenes from mythology and Christian history, commonly called history painting. Nevertheless, landscape painting had a practical value—to depict the domains of rulers and patrons—and it attracted influential artists, most notably, two French painters working in seventeenth-century Italy, Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, who each imbued landscape with noble sentiment. Their different approaches to landscape painting were soon seen to epitomize the two most valued modes of the genre: paysage champêtre and paysage héroïque. As the eighteenth-century theorist Pierre Henri de Valenciennes described it, “the first [champêtre or naturalistic] is painted with the feeling of color, the second [historique or héroïque] is painted with the color of feeling.” Until the late eighteenth century, most European artists and theorists agreed that the primary goal of painting presented in public should be to inspire higher thought and to instruct morality; anything else should be restricted to connoisseurs and private patrons.

The artists of eighteenth-century Britain were not as burdened with theory and precedent as their peers on the Continent, though the British held both Claude and Poussin in very high esteem. Toward the end of the century, two schools of British landscape painting coalesced, representing the dichotomy outlined by French artists and theorists. One trend, practiced by John Constable, among many, sought to capture nature as it was seen, with momentary light effects and the specificity of natural elements. The other, practiced by Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Martin, sought to capture nature as it was experienced, with feeling given precedent over topographical accuracy. This latter trend followed Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime, an especially British idea of art, written and visual, that literally stunned the senses, an idea that was quickly adopted by artists on the Continent, such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix. Happily, both modes of landscape painting required landscape sketches as raw material for their compositions, regardless of whether they struck awe, conveyed noble sentiment, or simply reproduced handsome topography.

Eighteenth-century British artists longed to travel in Italy, to drink at the fountain of antiquity and to see the vistas that had inspired previous generations. Those who could not get to Italy sought analogous landscapes closer to home. As travel became easier and more frequent, materials evolved. New papers and pads, watercolors, pastels, and portable easels, as well as visualizing aids, such as the camera lucida, contributed to the rise of capturing fleeting impressions out in nature, a new development in European practice.

The great names of British landscape—Constable and Turner, Paul Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, John Robert Cozens, and Samuel Palmer—are now appreciated as much for their landscape sketches as for their ambitious oil paintings. Yet our Museum had only a few examples. That changed in 2015 when Trustee Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer, in collaboration with our curator of prints and drawings, Dena M. Woodall, embarked to create the collection that is the subject of this publication and its related exhibition, Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond. Thanks to Mrs. Ulmer’s connoisseurship and generosity, the Museum has acquired more than seventy watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil sketches that together trace the rise of the landscape genre in Britain and its influence beyond, particularly in France, as seen in the work of Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. In this catalogue, Dena M. Woodall’s essay provides context for the works and artists represented in the collection, and she is the author of many of the entries on the individual works. We are very grateful to British scholars Anne Lyles, Martin Postle, Kim Sloan, Richard Stephens, Ian Warrell, and Jonny Yarker for their contributions. Our appreciation extends to Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker Ltd for their support of this publication.

Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer traces her family to the early Anglo-American settlers of Texas, before it joined the Union. Her family’s property, Allen Ranch, was the largest in the Houston area, comprising much of modern southeast Houston and its Ship Channel. Her ties to the Museum also go back generations. Her great-grandmother Rosa Christie Lum Allen was a member of the Museum’s Friends of Art organization in the 1920s. Deeply conscious of Texas history and her family’s heritage, Mrs. Ulmer established the Stuart Collection in memory of her parents, Robert Cummins Stuart IV and Frances Wells Stuart. Her interest in British landscape was piqued when she inherited an oil sketch by Constable, A View on the Banks of the River Stour at Flatford (1809–16), from her grandmother Rosa Allen Stuart Williams. Thanks to her unerring eye and generous spirit, her grandmother’s Constable can now be seen in the greater context of a pivotal moment in the history of European painting.

Gary Tinterow

Director

The Margaret Alkek Williams Chair

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston