Three solitary figures in a landscape

October 11, 2024 0 Comments

1   Man on a mountain

Caspar David Friedrich painted the work usually called The wanderer above the sea of fog in 1818.  Though it found little fame at the time, it’s long been seen as the quintessence of German Romanticism in the visual arts.

Caspar David Friedrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog, c1818 (Hamburger Kunsthalle)

Friedrich was the mountain man of the early nineteenth century.  Until the late eighteenth century, mountains, if they were painted at all, were relegated to the far distance in landscapes that themselves were minor, incidental parts of the scene.  Suddenly they burst into the foreground.  The mountain, close-up and rugged, offered the ideal locus for a direct encounter between the feeling human and the wildness of nature – a meeting critical to the concerns of Romantic writers and artists.  Friedrich specialised in mountain and woodland settings.

A solitary man, maybe the painter himself, is dressed all in black.  He stands on a high crag and gazes across a misty landscape of mountain peaks and slopes that recede into the far distance.  His back is turned to us, concealing his face, but we can safely take it that his reaction is one of wonder and awe at the immensity of the high wilderness before him. For the artist mountains were no longer inconvenient and ignorable parts of the world, unamenable to the cultivation that signified the human mastery of nature.  Now, as they reduce human beings in scale and importance in the world, they invite respect, and even adoration and communion.

Caspar David Friedriche, Cross in the mountains, 1808, (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden)

This shift in the relationship between man and wild nature meant that man now became part of nature, rather than standing apart from it.  And if a mountain could stand proud and sublime, so could the human observing it.  Friedrich’s figure is clearly intended as heroic – not in the banal sense that he’s ‘conquered’ the summit he stands on, but that he, and he alone, has reached the point from which he can truly be at one with the grandeur that surrounds him.

Beyond this it’s difficult to go with certainty in pinning the painting down.  Friedrich was a deeply pious man, but this picture lacks the obviously religious cues of some of his other paintings.  It’s sometimes claimed, on the basis of the Wanderer’s clothing, that the picture has a proto-nationalist message, but, if so, the message is well hidden.  Today you could argue that the Wanderer is an early environmentalist, urging respect for, rather than exploitation of, wild spaces.  Doubt and ambiguity are what keep Friedrich’s painting alive and open to new generations.

2   Dog on a beach

In the Courtauld Gallery in London is a small watercolour painted around 1841 by J.M.W. Turner.  It doesn’t have an original title, but it could easily and simply be called Dog, because that’s what it shows.  A lone dog stands, its hind legs bent, on an empty beach and barks (or howls) towards the sea.  First light has arrived in the sky, cloudless except for some brownish streaks on the right, but it’s yet to banish the blue shades of night gathered in the distance.

J.M.W. Turner, [Dog], c1841 (Courtauld Gallery)

The painting does have another title, (Dawn) after the wreck.  But it’s a fiction, invented by the critic and keen champion of Turner, John Ruskin.  This is how Ruskin interprets the scene in his Modern painters:

…  one of the saddest and most tender [of works with blood-like scarlet skies] is a little sketch of dawn, made in his last years. It is a small space of level sea shore; beyond it a fair, soft light in the east; the last storm-clouds melting away, oblique into the morning air; some little vessel—a collier, probably—has gone down in the night, all hands lost; a single dog has come ashore. Utterly exhausted, its limbs failing under it, and, sinking into the sand, it stands howling and shivering.  The dawn-clouds have the first scarlet upon them, a feeble tinge only, reflected with the same feeble blood-stain on the sand.

Ruskin’s imagining has no basis in evidence.  You wonder whether he was offended by the apparently emptiness of obvious meaning in Turner’s scene, and was desperate to fill it with the kind of melodramatic back-story so dear to Victorian artists and their audiences.  His constructed story also fitted in neatly to one of the themes of his chapter, death (‘Turner had to paint not only the labour and the sorrow of men, but their death.  There is no form of violent death which he has not painted’.)

The fact is, there is no wreck, no drownings, no lone survivor.  There’s just a solitary dog on a beach.  Is it howling, or barking?  No object of its attention is in sight.  Around it the sand, sea and coast extend, almost without end, except that there are puffs of smoke in the distance. A sliver of moon hangs above, its cool light reflected in the watery sand behind the dog.

It’s an undeniably lonely scene, caught at a moment of flux.  The dog is an enigma, isolated and unknowable.  He or she just is, and Turner is content to leave it like that.  Unlike Ruskin, he wasn’t a Victorian, but an original Romantic, able to accept what he saw and felt in the world around him, and to leave what he recorded for his viewers to make as they wished.

3   Farmer in a ploughed field

John Sell Cotman was a younger contemporary of Turner, and a very different artist.  Today he’s admired mainly for the series of pioneering watercolours he painted in Yorkshire and County Durham in the years between 1803 and 1805.  The ploughed field, a painting now in Leeds, dates from sometime after 1805. It’s a carefully made studio work, almost certainly based on earlier sketches, now lost.  The scene may well be one near Brandsby Hall, ten miles north of York, one the places where Cotman is known to have stayed when in Yorkshire.

John Sell Cotman, The ploughed field, c.1807 (Leeds Art Gallery)

As so often with Cotman, the view isn’t one that would strike the average artist as at all promising.  A furrowed field, and certainly one that takes up almost half the picture space, was an unlikely subject for any painter of the time, and the rest of the painting – gently sloping fields with trees, and a partly cloudy sky – is unremarkable.  Yet out of these simple elements Cotman created a composition of unstated subtlety and quiet impact, where form, colour, light and contour are perfectly combined. 

Since the painting came to light in 1923, Cotman scholars and the public have agreed that The ploughed field is among his finest works.  Cotman’s biographer, Sydney Kitson, thought it ‘one of the loveliest glimpses of an imaginative landscape ever created by Cotman’s mind and hand’, marking the summit of his early watercolour period.  According to Corinne Miller, ‘in terms of subject matter and composition it is both revolutionary and in advance if its time’

In part, the picture’s impact derives from the human figure standing on the ploughed field.  Human figures are generally absent from the masterpieces Cotman painted on the river Greta, at Duncombe Park and elsewhere in the north of England.   In this work, though, he clearly felt the compositional need for a firm focus of attention within the field.

Who is the figure?  The owner of the land, maybe?  But his clothing – an ochre jacket, black ‘shorts’, leggings and a hat – hardly suggests a member of the local gentry.  More likely he’s the farmer or ploughman.  He stands still, his arms to his side and his feet planted apart in the bare earth, in a portion of the field caught in a passing cloud shadow.  He’s looking straight towards us, as if inviting us to admire the perfect parallel lines of his ploughing.

But already I’m stretching interpretation too far, like Ruskin with Turner’s dog.  Many other possibilities could lie latent in this picture.  Might the crow carcasses hanging from sticks in the field, for example, offer an implied Et in Arcadia ego message about the omnipresence of death even in the loveliest of landscapes?  (David Hill suggests Cotman derived the crow theme from Robert Bloomfield’s well-known poem The farmer’s boy.)  Is there an implied contrast between the local countryman and the other, barely visible figure, a passing traveller making his way up a path in the middle distance? 

The truth is that Cotman was one of the least demonstrative of all major artists.  Completely confident in his masterly ability to orchestrate form and harmonise colour, he left others to answer the question (if it needed an answer) of what his pictures amounted to.  Once again, uncertainty and ambiguity pass the painting over from artist to viewer, and give it continued vitality.

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