by Dena M. Woodall

The Stuart family has been associated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, since its formation in 1900. From 1905 to 1910, Francita’s paternal great-aunt Ella Stuart Heyer served as president of the Houston Art League, the founding organization of the MFAH, and in 1926, Francita’s great-grandmother Rosa Christie Lum Allen joined the companion group, the Friends of Art. Great Britain has seemed to continually beckon the Stuart family. Francita’s mother, Frances Wells, developed an interest in British landscapes when she visited in 1924 and 1926, before her marriage to Robert Cummins Stuart in 1930, and the family regularly returned yearly after World War II. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, hosted the exhibition Turner Watercolors from the British Museum from November 2 to December 1, 1963, and the subject matter piqued the interest of Francita and her mother.² In 1996 the two women funded a Thomas Gainsborough drawing for the Museum. In 2015 this initial spark would ignite a sustained effort to build a collection of landscapes by British artists within the Museum’s walls by subject matter, medium, and region that previously had been lacking in the permanent collection. In loving memory of her parents, Frances Wells and Robert Cummins Stuart, Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer established in June 2018 an endowment for the collection in their names to continue building this legacy long into the future.

The Stuart Collection tells of the emergence of landscape as an international genre in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe and, in particular, its flowering as a distinct, preeminent genre in Britain. It coincided with watercolor’s flourishing as an independent and established medium through technical advances, resulting in its increased popularity and international acclaim for British watercolor artists. The collection and the companion exhibition, Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond, contain drawings, watercolors, oil sketches, prints, a sketchbook, and a watercolor box, encompassing more than seventy objects to date. The collection features several pairings of works, such as early and late-career works by an individual artist, work by teachers and their students, and views by the same artist depicted up close or from a distance.

Landscape suggests a pictorial representation of the countryside, whether as the subject or as the background scenery for a portrait or narrative composition. The term “landscape” in English is noted perhaps initially in John Milton’s poem “L’Allegro,” published in 1645, which describes a happy man taking joy in the delights of a spring day in a pastoral setting: “Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures / Whilst the landskip round it measures.”³ In the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, traveling Netherlandish artists brought the subject of landscape and their naturalistic approach to depicting it to England, where it fused with the established cartographic tradition. Beginning in the seventeenth century, young members of the British elite expanded their education by taking a Grand Tour, an instructive rite of passage to the Continent that influenced them as art patrons. British artists followed suit on these journeys. This experience had an impact on British taste, culture, and art. Patrons and artists alike were exposed to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and they were stimulated by the views of Rome, the Italian countryside, and ideal landscapes drawn and painted by such famed artists as Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa. As tourism increased, travelers began to set out for terrain farther afield. Yet, they also explored regions in their home country, such as the English Lake District, Wales, and Scotland. These travels increased the market for landscape artists, who infused their topographical landscapes with imaginative qualities.

From Prospect to Landscape

The collection unfolds with pioneers—artists who explored landscape as a subject in the mid-1700s and who made technical and intellectual innovations to reach an increased clientele base. The artist Alexander Cozens devoted himself early to landscapes while studying in Italy. There, he absorbed Claude’s approach to creating “ideal landscapes”—perfected and ordered conceptions of nature. His drawn landscapes were often monochromatic, made with pen and wash in brown or gray. Cozens returned to England in 1746 as a skilled landscape draftsman and drawing master. He devised systems and theorized an approach to landscape drawing in a number of treatises. In his tome The Shape, Skeleton and Foliage, of Thirty-Two Species, of Trees for the Use of Painting, and Drawing (published 1771, reprinted 1786), he presented a set of fundamental patterns that one could copy and arrange into landscape compositions, such as different tree species. In the 1780s, he published more extensive versions of his landscape theories, which included seeing compositional arrangements of lakes, mountains, and trees in blots of ink.⁴ He may have made the beautifully rendered monochromatic study A Small Pool with Willow Trees in preparation for one of his essays (cat. 5). His passion for nature heightened by imagination had a profound effect on the next generation of artists. In a similar vein, Cozens’s peer Thomas Gainsborough observed and drew from nature, but also liberated and improvised it, rearranging landscape elements to his own liking, as seen in his landscapes composed from sundry items in his studio or in his imaginative ones in wash (cat. 9). Returning from his Italian tour with a fresh outlook, the Welshman Richard Wilson was also a vital figure, reinterpreting Claude’s ideals and making landscape a professionally viable alternative for mid-eighteenth-century artists.

Although the medium of watercolor in Great Britain was initially used almost exclusively by topographers, cartographers, and engravers to tint or discreetly invigorate their linear compositions, its advancement and swift refinement as a medium during this period was brought about chiefly by landscapists. Watercolor is a water-based paint that is applied to paper. When unaccompanied by another medium, watercolor is translucent. However, sometimes it is used in combination with gouache (or body color), which is mixed with clay or opaque white pigment to make its colors appear dense. The artist Paul Sandby, who previously had been a mapmaker and military draftsman, approached the subject of landscape with precision. Throughout his lengthy career, his topographical views from across Britain accurately recorded particular places, both urban and rural. One writer about 1800 noted that Sandby “familiarized us with our own scenery” at a time when the geography was being reshaped by industrial, agricultural, and urban change.⁵ As a founder of the Society of Artists in 1760 and a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, Sandby had a pivotal standing in the art world that helped to popularize and professionalize the watercolor tradition.

Forging of a British School of Landscape

Near the end of the eighteenth century, a British school of landscape began to take shape. Works by artists tied to nature became a conduit through which the Romantic imagination could grow. John Robert Cozens carried on his father’s legacy with poetic, atmospheric landscapes of refinement and carefully controlled graduated color washes; these influenced Thomas Girtin and his contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner, who copied the younger Cozens’s drawings at the unofficial academy of Dr. Thomas Monro.⁶ Cozens captured expanses of land and sky, often looking at a place from a distance and valuing the grandeur of nature (cats. 16, 17). At this time, aesthetic theory became increasingly influential, such as Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (published in 1757). Burke described the human reaction of awe to nature’s immensity and turbulence or to its gentle and aesthetically pleasing elements, which landscape artists, in turn, would depict.

There was an appetite for information about the natural world. Scientific investigations led to discoveries in such fields as meteorology, geology, mineralogy, and optics related to sight and light, revealing more about nature. People questioned Earth’s age, and its geology yielded raw materials that would propel British industrialization. The artist-geologist William Day traveled the British countryside drawing rock formations and strata while minimizing or eliminating human activity from his scenes, and later James Ward captured the effects of coastal erosion on limestone cliffs (cats. 22, 25).

A visual shift occurred, with new ways of thinking about the world. In the programmatic travel to the Continent, some artists strayed from typical depictions of ancient Roman monuments, such as the Coliseum, noted in touring books. Richard Wilson used black and white chalks to draw attention to the trees within the Villa Borghese in a subtle blend of tones and forms (cat. 3). Thomas Jones focused on a succession of mottled, whitewashed walls on the Aventine Hill (cat. 14), and Francis Towne, working in monochrome in his sophisticated, seemingly modern approach, captured light through trees instead of emphasizing the impressive volcanic lake beyond (cat. 12). Towne’s travel companion John “Warwick” Smith abandoned ink outlines and tonal washes altogether, instead applying color directly for his view of Lake Como (cat. 15). Unlike his artist-friends working in Rome, Smith showed his watercolors, of increased chromatic intensity, regularly in London in succeeding years.

The artists Girtin and Turner absorbed qualities from the work of Cozens and Sandby, aggrandizing their concepts with sensitivity and expression. As a result, they had an impact on the subsequent generations. Though trained as a topographical draftsman under Edward Dayes, the short-lived Girtin was an innovator of watercolor and of the subject of landscape. He also initiated his own sketching society, a precursor to the later, more established nineteenth-century watercolor societies. He created a sense of place with subjectivity and drama, along with a broad handling of the medium, atmospheric effects, and enriched color. A transformative shift in his style can be seen by comparing his early, more controlled approach in Rochester Castle to the brooding, evocative Wetherby Bridge, painted in 1800 (cats. 27, 28). Likewise, Turner’s topographical training informed his art. During his long and highly influential career, he pushed beyond accurately recording the terrain of England and the Continent to achieving great heights of creative expression (cats. 29, 30). Turner was revolutionary in his watercolor technique, and he produced evocative scenes imbued with atmosphere and light.

Artists, poets, and tourists gained a greater appreciation for being out in the British countryside. From 1777, William Gilpin influenced the taste for landscapes, encouraging a wave of tourists to travel in their homeland. One of his five treatises on the picturesque was illustrated with aquatints from his summer tours to Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and the Lake District, among others. Gilpin gave sophisticated instructions to observant travelers and amateur watercolorists in his third essay, “The Art of Sketching.” His discourse explains how to draw landscapes in nature, providing practical advice on such matters as perspective, composition, and shading.⁷ He encouraged his readers to capture the essence of a scene and to make realistic and aesthetically pleasing sketches, championing the picturesque and its qualities of irregularity, roughness, asymmetry, and variety. Domestic travel to contemplate nature increased further from 1792 to 1815, when the revolutionary wars with France closed off the European mainland from touring and when native scenery became a source of inspiration and national pride. After 1800, the population grew exponentially more urban than rural and agrarian due to the British economy’s dependence on commerce, trade, and manufacturing. Rapid industrial growth resulted in further encroachment upon the land, but it also led to an increased interest in the visual pleasures of landscapes among art patrons, as an escape from the urban gloom.

Innovation—The Great Generation of British Landscape Artists

A period of innovation occurred about 1800–1820 as watercolors became more appreciated and more often exhibited. Although the Royal Academy had accepted watercolors into exhibitions, they were often hung at a disadvantage, and watercolor artists who did not also make oil paintings could not be members. Therefore, separate institutions were established for watercolor painters, such as the Society of Painters in Water Colours (also known as the Old Water-Colour Society), which was formed in 1804 and held its first exhibition in London in April 1805. Landscapes were prime subjects in these viewings, and a founding member, John Varley, copiously showed picturesque views made with a broad handling of the medium, as in Mount Snowdon in Wales (cat. 37). Exhibiting societies were also established in less metropolitan areas, such as Bristol, Newcastle, and Norwich. The Norwich Society of Artists had its first public exhibition in 1805. The group exhibited the work of notable artists. Among them, John Cotman, who joined in 1806, reveled in the pure effect of watercolor with flat color washes. In response to Girtin, Cotman invested his landscapes with brilliant color harmonies and emotion (cat. 38).⁸

The nineteenth century saw watercolors not just as preparatory or for personal pleasure, to be stored in portfolios by individual collectors, but as works to be framed, exhibited, purchased, and hung on walls. Manufacturers and merchants made an increasing number and variety of products for professional and amateur artists, including raw or commercially prepared pigments, drawing supplies, brushes, assorted papers, and packaging materials in portable and convenient containers, along with equipment for working out-of-doors. The British company Winsor & Newton published wholesale catalogues of artistic materials and first introduced watercolors in metal tubes by 1846, providing fluid paint that diluted easier than small, dry color cakes. New pigments in watercolor were also introduced, giving artists a more vibrant, highly keyed palette with which to work.⁹

Members of the emergent sketching societies, working either individually or informally together, took to the open air to study motifs from nature, such as a tree or a plant or wider vistas. Finding truth and “a close and continual observance of nature” was a key precept for the influential artist John Constable throughout his long working life.¹⁰ Constable had a warm attachment to his familiar surroundings, sketching and painting en plein air (outdoors) in his native Suffolk, in Hampstead Heath, near London, and along the south coast. His innovative works marked developments that would lead to Impressionism. Constable supported his love of plein air sketching by drawing a comparison with Beethoven, who was only six years older than him: “Beethoven liked to compose in the open air.”¹¹ His depiction of specific places with changing conditions of light and weather and his evocation of a personal and emotional mood aligned with the Romantic spirit of the age and the poetry of the era, such as by Thomas Gray, John Clare, and William Wordsworth. Furthermore, Constable was an admirer of the poetry book The Seasons by James Thomson, who was a contemporary of Turner’s.¹² The Stuart Collection contains sketches by Constable in graphite, watercolor, and oil (cats. 31, 32, 33, 35), as well as prints that document his attempt to show his work to a larger public (cat. 34).

The Triumph of Landscape—The Rise of the Professional Landscape Painter

By the 1820s, watercolor had been firmly established as a medium of value in the public’s imagination. Landscapes in watercolor could achieve a freedom of touch, brilliant color orchestration, fluidity of forms, rich colors, and more robust tonal contrasts. Artists were able to earn a good living through their watercolors. The annual Society of Painters in Water Colours exhibition became a fixture, and it secured financial stability, allowing it to achieve its ambitions of professionalization, to maintain a significant market, and to encourage the “coherent public promotion of watercolor as an independent practice.”¹³ This achievement can be seen in a flood of finished exhibition watercolors by various practitioners, from professional watercolorists, including fashionable drawing masters such as John Varley and David Cox, who wrote drawing manuals, to nonprofessional or amateur artists. Such works were seen by members of different classes and regional identities, such as William Turner of Oxford, who was geographically distant from the London art scene.¹⁴ Like John Varley, a generation before him, the technically versatile artist David Cox was an influential drawing master who penned several influential treatises.¹⁵ He also responded to Constable’s ever-changing images of sky and land and encouraged the application of direct color with broad strokes and promoted popular sketching locations in North Wales and along the coast (cats. 39, 40). From the same generation, Peter De Wint had an affinity with his native landscape, much like Constable. De Wint portrayed expansive panoramas of agricultural lands in such regions as the Midlands, Kent, and Essex with warm, rich tones of browns and greens deriving from Girtin (cats. 41, 42).

The British excelled in landscapes, and the medium of watercolor garnered significant international acclaim. Around the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, travel between Britain and Continental Europe opened up in 1814–15. French artists, such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, traveled to London in the 1810s and 1820s and saw British advances in the field at the societies’ exhibitions and in galleries. Shaped by both Girtin and Turner, Richard Parkes Bonington had a short but productive life. He had worked in France about 1820 and possessed a natural, technical facility with the medium. His direct approach to landscape influenced his British contemporaries and his close circle of friends, among them Anthony Copley Fielding, Thomas Shotter Boys, and subsequently, William Callow, all of whom are represented in the Stuart Collection. However, he also had an impact on French artists, such as Delacroix, with whom he shared a studio in Paris, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, both of whom are also in the collection. The profound influence of British landscape artists is evidenced by the Salon of 1824 in Paris, where Delacroix claimed Constable as “the father of our school of landscape” and where Constable, Bonington, and Copley Fielding received gold medals for their landscapes.¹⁶ Constable’s naturalism had a decisive effect on French landscape artists. Also, Cox’s large exhibition watercolors and his loose, broadly handled studies with layers of color wash in translucent patches or with dashes of flickering diluted pigment from the 1850s were of great interest in Paris. They have been likened to the works of Eugène Louis Boudin and early Claude Monet, who were eager to paint light and atmospheric landscapes.¹⁷

Europe’s reopening to British travelers encouraged them to wander freely outside the confines of their homeland. Artists again depicted Continental locations, producing watercolor landscapes that they then sometimes reproduced as engravings, whether as single prints or bound in books that could garner more attention from the wider public. Watercolorists enjoyed continuing success into the latter part of the nineteenth century, as exemplified in the Stuart Collection by two watercolors by Edward Lear from Italy and Greece (cats. 57, 58). Lear had roamed throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and India and published travel journals with illustrations based on his watercolors. His loose line work in graphite, long pen strokes, and clear, delicate color washes, with scribbled notations, give viewers a sense of place and convey the immediacy of the artist’s experience.

Among nineteenth-century members of the British upper class and prospering middle class, such works could serve as mementos of journeys taken. For others, these images could simply provide a vicarious experience or an inspiration to travel, just as they do today, for people all over the world. Although some of the landscapes portrayed in the Stuart Collection have remained relatively unchanged over time, some have undergone dramatic alterations. The Stuart Collection preserves these views and also documents the fresh perspectives, new techniques, and evolving artistic styles used by artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their depictions of these enduring vistas.

Notes

1. See John Constable’s letter to John Dunthorne, May 1802, in R. B. Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence: Early Friends and Maria Bicknell (Mrs. Constable), vol. 2 (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1964), 122.

2. See Edward Croft-Murray, Turner Watercolors from the British Museum: A Loan Exhibition Circulated by the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: The Institution, 1963). The exhibition was organized by the department of prints and drawings of the British Museum. It traveled to several museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

3. See John Milton, “L’Allegro,” line 70, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44731/lallegro.

4. A New Method of Assisting the Invention of Drawing Original Compositions in Landscape, published in 1785, and The Various Species of Composition in Nature. See Kim Sloan, “A New Chronology for Alexander Cozens Part II: 1759–86,” Burlington Magazine 127, no. 987 (June 1985): 354–61, 363, 359, and Kim Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens: The Poetry of Landscape (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1986).

5. See John Bonehill, Stephen Daniels, and Nicholas Alfrey, Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), 13.

6. Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner copied drawings by John Robert Cozens, Edward Dayes, and others at Dr. Monro’s home, sometimes in exchange for “half a crown and a plate of oysters.” See Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. 3, ed. by Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 1090, Monday November 12th; Andrew Wilton, Turner in Wales (Llandudno, Gwynedd: Mostyn Art Gallery, 1984), 9, and Andrew Wilton, “Picturesque Composition with a Distant View of Tours from the North East, c. 1796 by Joseph Mallord William Turner,” catalogue entry, April 2012, in David Blayney Brown, ed., J. M. W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turnerpicturesque-composition-with-a-distant-view-oftours-from-r1141302 (accessed October 23, 2024).

7. See William Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 1792).

8. Watercolors were shown at the Royal Academy, but insufficient attention was being paid to them, and landscapes were not as revered as highly as other subjects. See Jane Bayard, Works of Splendor and Imagination: The Exhibition Watercolor, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1981), 1–2, and Wendell V. Harris, “A Handlist of Nineteenth-Century London Societies and Their Predecessors,” Nineteenth Century Studies 18, no. 1 (2004): 39–162.

9. For more information on the materials artists used in the nineteenth century in Britain and France, see Kimberly Schenck, “Crayon, Paper, and Paint: An Examination of Nineteenth-Century Drawing Materials,” in The Essence of Line: French Drawings form Ingres to Degas (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 56–79.

10. See Constable’s Lecture, July 25, 1836, in Worcester. He also commented that “we exist in a landscape and are creatures of a landscape.” See Robert Charles Leslie, Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896), 342–43.

11. See Graham Reynolds, “Constable, Tradition and Romanticism,” in Graham Reynolds, Charles Rhyne, and Julies Meier-Graefe, John Constable, R.A. (1776–1837): An Exhibition Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, Mezzotints (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 1988), 7.

12. The interest in landscape was expressed in poetry but also seen in gardening and the study of aesthetics. James Thomson’s poem “The Seasons: Summer,” lines 1438–41, evokes a mood about the landscape that struck Constable: “Heavens! What a goodly prospect spreads around / Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires / And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all / the stretching landskip into smoke decays! Successive planes across the landscape, which recede into the distance until the landscape is lost in haze.” See James Thomson, The Seasons: A Poem (New York: Clark, Austin & Co., 1854), 78, and Sandro Jung, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015), 11; Jonathan Wordsworth, Michael C. Jaye, and Robert Woof, William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 56–58; and John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 151–55.

13. See Greg Smith, The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760–1824 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 4, and for more information on the subject, see Jane Bayard, Works of Splendor and Imagination: The Exhibition Watercolor, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1981).

14. During their artistic careers, drawing masters taught non-professionals or wrote drawing manuals. The term “amateur artist” describes a person who enjoyed and practiced an art form without expectation of payment and often were “gentlemen” or “ladies.” On this subject, see Kim Sloan, “A Noble Art”: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000).

15. John Varley’s manuals include Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Design (1815), List of Colours, and A Practical Treatise on Perspective (1817). David Cox’s treatises include Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Water-Colour (1814), A Series of Progressive Lessons Intended to Elucidate the Art of Landscape for Young Beginners (1816), and The Young Artist’s Companion (1825).

16. See Patrick Noon, Constable to Delacroix, British Art and the French Romantics (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 10–13, 46.

17. See Scott Wilcox, Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2008).