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Since its foundation, just over 150 years ago, the National Gallery of Scotland has amassed over 2,000 English drawings and watercolours, but, as we learn from Christopher Baker’s useful introduction to the catalogue here under review, these arrived at the Gallery more by accident than by design. The majority are the result of gifts or bequests and consequently the collection is uneven in quality and in coverage. But when these include the Vaughan Bequest of Turner watercolours in 1900 to the thirty-two Edward Lears from the estate of Sir Steven Runciman, allocated in 2001, the Gallery has certainly been the for­tunate beneficiary of some of the most enlightened and assiduous connoisseurs of their respective eras. Left to its own devices, the Gallery has only very occasionally put itself out to acquire English work of the first rank. Among these must certainly be counted John Sell Cotman’s A pool on the river Greta near Rokeby (unfortunately referred to as by Girtin in the overview on p.12), purchased along with a fine Bonington from Paterson’s Gallery in London in 1913. Perhaps then the recent arrival of Vaughan’s Turners, aided, no doubt, by the new provision of an acquisitions fund, stimulated this interest; but since most of this short-lived flurry of spending was made at Paterson’s, one wonders whether there was some underlying Scottish connection which helped it along. For the remainder of the twentieth century the Gallery’s curators, by and large, had other priorities. An exception was made in 1988, when one of the most wonderful of late Girtins, The village of Jedburgh (Fig.62), was added to the collection, now happily adopted by the country that inspired it and tagged on the Gallery’s website as ‘Scottish art’.
As Baker points out, apart from the Turners and a relatively small handful of star items, the collection is not particularly well known, nor more than selectively published. With this volume that has certainly changed and the full extent of the Gallery’s holdings are recorded in a publicly accessible form for the first time. So far, so good. In keeping with current expectations, all the illustrations are in colour, and the book is enlivened by numerous full-page details, which more than alleviate the inevitable dryness from which any enterprise of this kind must suffer. Whether such sumptuous production is appropriate, and whether the cover price of £125 is justified, the market will decide; it seems more likely that what is now ‘publicly accessible’ is more for the benefit of users of university or museum libraries than the private individual.
In the ten years or so that Baker has worked on this catalogue, ideas of what constitutes ‘the public’ and what constitutes ‘access’ have, of course, changed out of all recognition. So, while the provision of so many colour illustrations is a cause for celebration, it is impossible not to regret that many works are not illustrated at all. Presumably the Gallery aspires, eventually, to have all its collections online. Until then, readers of this catalogue will experience an inevitable degree of frustration. Given that choices had to be made, they often reflect the perceived quality of the work. So a previously anonymous sepia sketch, now entirely plausibly attributed to John Robert Cozens, is illustrated, while Samuel Palmer’s A gipsy encampment, now downgraded as the work of a ‘follower’, is not. In the present writer’s view, the latter is a perfectly acceptable example of the artist’s work, probably exhibited in 1847 as The gypsy dell: moonlight, as I suggested in my book on the artist, a reference overlooked by Baker. The 1840s was a difficult decade for Palmer, as he adapted to the demands of the annual Watercolour Society exhibitions, and his style was prone to fluctuate as he tried different approaches; readers wanting to understand this for themselves will be obliged to seek elsewhere. One handy source would be the small catalogue from 1979 of the Helen Barlow Bequest, with which this Palmer arrived at the Gallery, and in which all fifty-six items are illustrated.
The Gallery holds a particularly extensive group of sketches and studies by one of Palmer’s Watercolour Society colleagues, Joshua Cristall; they are among the earliest acquisitions, having been bequeathed in 1864 by the dealer John Scott. Baker is scrupulous in noting condition throughout the catalogue, and many of these sheets are badly faded and discoloured through over-exposure. Given that they are unlikely to be exhibited, it seems especially unfortunate that the opportunity was not taken to illustrate more here, when they include cloud studies, in which there is currently such interest, and when they extend understanding of Cristall, a once popular but now rather overlooked artist, in ways not represented among other major holdings in London or Bath. As a general principle, a note on where to find reproductions of works omitted from the present catalogue would have been much appreciated; in the case of Turner’s The Medway, this appears on the Gallery’s own website. A harbinger, let us hope, of much more to come.
It is the National Gallery of Scotland’s Turners which are the best-known asset among its English drawings. Indeed, it now claims that the presentation of the Vaughan Bequest (the bulk, though not all of their holding) every year in January is the world’s longest running exhibition, albeit inter­mittent. They have been catalogued several times, most recently by Baker himself, in a booklet of 2006. The opportunity has been taken to update and revise earlier scholarship. In the case of D NG 889, a sketch of Durham from the Scottish tour of 1801, a watermark of 1794 is noted; Baker, who previously read the half-covered sky as a sunset, now asserts, ‘the sun is rising’. The Turners apart, the longest entries are devoted to the three watercolours by William Blake; two of them come from the series of Bible illustrations made for Thomas Butts, the third is one of the coloured prints, commonly known as Hecate, but for which Baker prefers the title proposed by Hamlyn in 2000, The night of Enitharmon’s joy. Each deserves the extended treatment it receives here, the more so when the biblical subjects, at least, passed almost without comment in Butlin’s catalogue raisonné of 1981. Job confessing his presumption to God who answers from the whirlwind is reproduced with Blake’s own frame, drawn on the same sheet as the image.
A massive undertaking such as this is bound to throw up some surprises and some curiosities. A work which undoubtedly falls into both categories is Henry John Stock’s The four and twenty elders, exhibited in 1912, an extraordinary homage to Blake which the Gallery purchased in 1994. Other rarities include a fine mid-eighteenth century drawing of the Colosseum by the Irishman Hugh Primrose Dean and a very early monochrome landscape by Copley Fielding, in the style of the Sketching Society compositions. If these give some hint of the range of this collection, and of many other greater and lesser works which invite inspection, study and enjoyment, the catalogue will have served its purpose.
Some further observations follow:
D 3601: View of Granville, Normandy, by John Sell Cotman. There are brown wash versions of this outline in the collections of the Courtauld Institute, London, and the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. Granville was not included in Cotman’s 1824 sale at Christie’s, where he disposed of most of the working material for his Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, but not the landscape studies, which he still hoped to exploit.
D NG 473: The Chapter House of Abbey Church of St Georges-de-Bocherville, by John Sell Cotman. Signed and dated 1831, this can hardly have been offered for sale at Christie’s in 1824.
D 5023.9: The corn mill at Rowsley, Derbyshire, by David Cox. A further group of chalk studies of the mill is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
D NG 476: The Grove of Academia – Plato teaching, by Joshua Cristall. Not lent by Vine to the 1821 Watercolour Society exhibition, but purchased there for 20 gns, when it bore the title Instruction – A Composition.
D NG 4516: Mrs Jordan in ‘The Country Girl’, by Thomas Heaphy. Presumably the watercolour exhibited at the Watercolour Society in 1811, no.79, as Vanity; sold for 50 gns to ‘Mr Smith’, more than likely a pseudonym.
D 4692: Landscape with a windmill, attributed to John Henderson. Illustrated on The Art Fund website with a pencil drawing on the verso, not referred to here; see www.artfund.org/artwork/3095/tunbridge-rocks-kent-and-landscape-with-windmill.
D 5551.29: Fortress of San Giorgio, Cephalonia (Kefalonia), by Edward Lear. The change in the terrain is noted, but not its cause in the massive earthquake of 1953. Here and elsewhere, the notes written by the previous owner on his drawings for the 1991 exhibition catalogue Watercolours by Edward Lear from the collection of the Hon. Sir Steven Runciman still need to be consulted.
D 5061: Lake Klonthal, by Thomas Smith. The album from which the Smith drawings now scattered in many collections were removed was not entirely the discovery it was portrayed as being in 1973, having been in the possession of the collector James Knowles and appearing in his sale, London, Christie’s, 27th–29th May 1908, lot 254, when bought by Parsons for £1-15s.