Edward Dayes (1763-1804)
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
Paul Sandby (1725-1809)
John Warwick Smith (1749-1831)
John Robert Cozens (1752-1799)
J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)
Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)
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17th November 2005 - 12 February 2006
The remarkable Spooner collection
of early British watercolours is one of the finest of its kind and
will be exhibited for the first time since 1968 at the Hermitage
Rooms, Somerset House, London.
This is a rare opportunity to see the majority
of this little-known but important collection with around 80 works
on view, including outstanding landscape and figurative subjects
by Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, Francis Towne, Alexander and
J.R. Cozens, Thomas Girtin, John Constable, John Sell Cotman and
J.M.W.Turner, as well as numerous fine works by lesser-known artists,
many never previously exhibited. The exhibition, entitled Gainsborough
to Turner: British Watercolours from the Spooner Collection,
spans the ‘golden age’ of watercolour painting from
around 1750 to 1850 and demonstrates the inventiveness and imagination
of artists working in the medium during this extraordinary period
of British art.
William Wycliffe Spooner (1882-1967) was
the eldest son of Dr William Archibald Spooner, the celebrated Warden
of New College, Oxford, forever associated with the linguistic lapses
or ‘spoonerisms’ that bear his name. An engineer and
inventor of an industrial drying process, he ran his company in
Ilkley, Yorkshire, until well into his seventies. He had always
been interested in art and acquired his first drawings while still
struggling to make his mark as an engineer and subsequent success
in business enabled him to extend his collection. Although he had
a good eye for drawings, he had little interest in art scholarship
and took guidance from friends and dealers and especially from his
wife, Mercie, whom he married in 1955, and whose wide knowledge
of the London art market was invaluable to the formation of the
collection. Spooner’s close friendship with Sir John Witt
led him to bequeath the collection to the Courtauld Institute of
Art on his death in 1967.
A key work in the exhibition is one of
Spooner’s early purchases, Edward Dayes’ Somerset House
from the Thames, which took pride of place in his house. The fact
that this picture will now be on display in the very building depicted
would no doubt have given him immense pleasure. Precisely drawn
architectural images such as Somerset House and Girtin’s majestic
Peterborough Cathedral were chosen with Spooner’s engineer’s
eye for fine draughtsmanship. However, his abiding love was for
the countryside, which can be seen from the numerous images of mountains,
lakes and rivers in the collection, exemplified by Francis Towne’s
panoramic Welsh vistas and Cozens’s dramatic Alpine view,
In the Canton of Unterwalden. Spooner owned a house near Dove Cottage
in Grasmere and his affection for the Lake District led him to purchase
two magnificent views of Borrowdale and Skiddaw by John White Abbott.
Spooner’s choice of subject matter
is reflected in the exhibition’s themes through which the
theory and practice of British watercolour are explored. The first
room contains architectural images, among them watercolours of London
and the Thames, including Somerset House and two fine views of Greenwich
by Cozens and John Varley. Spooner’s penchant for drawings
of ecclesiastical and ancient buildings mirrors the eighteenth-century
collectors’ taste for antiquity and ruins, as epitomised by
Cotman’s evocative Doorway to the Refectory, Kirkham Priory,
Yorkshire - a brilliant example of his distinctive simplified drawing
style developed around 1805.
Improved transportation and the subsequent
growth of tourism encouraged artists to travel in Britain and beyond,
recording scenery and human life both for sale to patrons and collectors
as well as for their own pleasure. One of Spooner’s favourite
pictures, Cozens’s Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, and two
small Turner sketches of the Drachenfels on the Rhine and Bregenz
by Lake Constance, completed in 1817 and 1840 on his return to England,
are just a few of the great works displayed in a section dedicated
to artists abroad, some of whom, such as David Wilkie and William
Daniell, travelled as far as Constantinople and India to find their
subjects.
Rural landscapes dominate the collection,
as evident from the following two rooms in which the treatment of
nature is investigated, from Gainsborough’s ‘invented’
compositions of woods, cattle and sheep of the early 1780s to closely
observed river scenes made ‘on the spot’ in Wales by
William James Müller some sixty years later. Alexander Cozens’s
symbolic Blasted Tree in a Landscape is one of a number of drawings
in a section focusing on trees.
The exhibition concludes with seascapes
and figurative groups, among them seven by Rowlandson whose work
Spooner particularly enjoyed. His Coombe Bridge, Devon, a fanciful
wooded scene with river, packhorse and rustic figures, typifies
the ‘Picturesque’ - the fashionable aesthetic theory
popularised by amateur artist the Revd William Gilpin following
a tour of the Lake District in 1772, and later satirised by Rowlandson
in his famous illustrated book of the ‘tours’ of Dr
Syntax.
As a guide to the technical development
of watercolour, key works are highlighted throughout the exhibition.
Topographical views, such as Paul Sandby’s brightly coloured
gouache drawing, Henry VIII Gateway, Windsor Castle, and Towne’s
characteristic ‘coloured’ outline drawings, contrast
with the later more naturalistic and freely handled washes of Girtin,
Turner and de Wint. The eighteenth-century view of watercolour as
a less serious art than oil painting persists to this day. However,
the power and quality of the images shown in this exhibition dispel
any notion of watercolour as unglamorous and instead demonstrate
the aesthetic appeal and beauty of the medium.
The exhibition, a collaboration between
the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Huntington Library, Art Collections
and Botanical Gardens, California, and The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere,
will be held in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House - an appropriately
intimate setting for these fine works.
exhibitions
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