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Revd William Gilpin's Influence on English Watercolour The influence of the Reverend William Gilpin on English watercolour can not be underestimated. Although he was not a professional painter like Turner, he had the gift of artist in himself. He also had the gift of a writer. And this second gift, nit the first, was of much more importance for the development of English watercolour. The word picturesque became the key word for English watercolour at the end of 18 -th and in early 19 -th century due to the books and essays of the Reverend William Gilpin. From this great variety, which the surfaces of lakes assume, we may draw this conclusion, that the painter may take great liberties, in point of light and shade, in his representation of water.
It is, in many cases, under no rule, that we are acquainted with; or under rules so lax, that the imagination is left very much at large. (Gilpin, 100) Who else could it be but that arbiter of the eighteenth-century picturesque taste, the Revd William Gilpin? Many guide-book writers had preceded him - Johnson, Boswell, and Thomas Gray among them - but only he, as early as 1772, could have written in terms of granting the artist the license to 'take great liberties' with what Nature put before him. It is a aesthetic leap that marks him out as a great deal more than just another dilettante; he was only one step away from the full-blooded romantic conception of a creative imagination that half-creates and half-perceives. There were times when he could be amusingly literal about the artist's right to alter Nature to the requirements of the picturesque as when, in his guide book on the Wye valley, he incites the enthusiastic tourist to correct the unsightly gable ends in the ruins of Titten Abbey: A mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it? ) might be of service in fracturing some of them; particularly those of the cross isles, which are not only disagreeable in themselves, but confound the perspective? . Although people had painted what we think of as landscapes before then, landscape painting as a way of engaging with nature really took off at the end of the eighteenth century, with the notion of the picturesque. A key figure in the development of the picturesque was the Reverend William Gilpin, whose tours of Britain were published between 1782 and 1802 (Gilpin 1972).
Gilpin suggested we should judge real landscapes as if they were paintings. Based on the study of paintings by painters such as Claude Lorraine and Salvatore Rosa, Gilpin's aesthetic criteria emphasized open, prospect landscapes, conceived in terms of a tripartite composition, divided into foreground, distance and second distance. Claude's landscapes were generally serene, open vistas, whereas Rosas were smaller-scale and more turbulent. Gilpin was interested in representing what he called general nature. Individual elements within the view were interpreted according to the overall composition. As he said in his Catalogue of Drawings of 1802, We always conceive the detail to be the inferior part of the picture.
We look with more pleasure at a landscape well designed, composed, and enlightened (Bermingham 1994: 88). The conclusion we make is the Reverend William Gilpin produced a great influence on English watercolour in 18 -th century both with his paintings and his books where he gave the theory of picturesque. In the early part of the nineteenth century, British watercolorists sought to establish the medium as painting's equal. The Society of Painters in Water-Colours was founded in 1804 to rival the Royal Academy and through simple competition to prove watercolour's potential. There, the watercolorists achieved their goal through the exploration of a wide range of techniques and through the creation of large-scale, highly-finished works, framed and exhibited like oil paintings.
Notes (1) Observations on the River Wye (1782) p. 33. Works Cited Bermingham, Ann (1994) 'System, Order and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795, ' in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 77 - 101. (VJP) Gilpin William Observations on the River Wye (1782) p. 33.
Gilpin, William (1972) Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel and On Sketching Landscape, London: Gregg. (V 8 N) Gilpin, William Observations on Cumberland and Westmoreland, 1786. Poole and New York: Woodstock Books, 1996. Lancaster University Paintings of William Gilpin 13 August 2004 < web >. < web >. International Herald Tribune Touch of the Master In the Early Amateur 13 August 2004 < web >.
Artistic Influences 13 August 2004 < web >.
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Research essay sample on Revd William Gilpin Influence On English Watercolour
