Bonington's coastal scenes.

THE Winter exhibition of Regency watercolourists at the Courtauld Gallery reminded one that Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28) merits more attention than he is at present paid. He stands out even in the company of Turner. Turner in all his magnificence did not scorn the unassertive clarity and translucence of the watercolour. Indeed, when he wished, he could use it to conjure novelty from a hackneyed subject, as in his tinted sketch of c.1810 in which Mont Blanc ascends like a spout of light at the end of an alpine pass (Courtauld Gallery). Bonington too could elicit splendour from the mild wash of pigment and water on paper. Turner lived fifty years longer than Bonington who, given the same lifespan, might have equalled him in versatility and outdone him in lucidity of form. What Bonington accomplished in the 160 oil-paintings and 300 watercolours of eight years of artistic activity was wondrous.

Pure watercolour is well suited to landscape, especially the landscape of Northern Europe, with its wide capricious skies, rain-dazzle and swingeing clouds; with its lurching shadows and the sunlit mobility of its rivers and tides. Although watercolour decorations, permeating the lime plaster of Pompeian walls, have lasted as long as the walls themselves, watercolour is a frail medium on paper, needing protection from the light it glorifies. Frail and facile: during the late eighteenth century the simplicity of the technique, and its swiftness in capturing 'picturesque' turns of the weather, at first attracted jobbing topographers such as Sandby and Rooker. Soon afterwards, topography became art in the sketches of John Cozens and Thomas Girtin. Cozens inventively enhanced the records of his travels. His turbulent 'Gothick' landscapes made him a natural companion for the equally tumultuous William Beckford as they sped through Europe together. On the shortlived Girtin some of the magic of Thomas Bewick's countryside engravings rubbed off. Turner esteemed him, remarking with dramatic exaggeration, 'If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved'.

Bonington was not punctilious in signing his watercolours, but his authorship is rarely disputable. Two of the coastal scenes for which he is well known have recently been exhibited and may be taken as criteria: Shipping on the Seine Estuary (c.1825) from the Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, shown at the Royal Academy; and Fishing Boats Ashore (c. 1822) from the Scharf Bequest at the Courtauld Gallery. In both sketches the bell-towered outline of an estuarine town across the fields (probably Quilleboeuf) seems to fray the hem of a diaphanous sheet of steep cloud. The pale blue ebb-tide drifts towards the low horizon.

The early pictures of Turner, Bonington's avowed hero, may be said to have fathered Bonington's seascapes. Bonington's actual father was a character as unconventional as Turner himself. He resembled the gadabout rogue-hero of a Picaresque novel. What little he shared with his sedate and purposeful son was artistic talent--at least, enough talent to have two pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. When Richard Parkes Bonington was born in Nottingham in 1802, his father was a drawing master, having been a gaoler at Nottingham Prison until 1797. Parkes was the name of Bonington's mother, who had come from Birmingham to run an apparently failing school for girls. Bonington's father sold prints and sought commissions for views and portraits, before standing unsuccessfully as the Whig candidate in a local election in 1815. Lace-making had long been the traditional handicraft of Nottingham. Having acquired a lace-making mechanism, he hit upon the idea of smuggling it out to Calais, and later Paris, so that Nottingham lace could be illegally manufactured there. Thus he risked a return as an inmate to the gaol he had once helped to control.

As a result Bonington found himself in Paris in 1818, enrolled and drawing from the antique in the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, a time-server and oddly romanticising Neoclassicist, whose unusual career began as an adulator of Napoleon and ended with his fresco on the dome of the Pantheon in Paris of the apotheosis of the restored Bourbon monarchy, for which King Charles X made him a Baron. Bonington, in the ample time Gros left his pupils, made watercolour sketches of the pictures in the Louvre; particularly, one suspects, of the seascapes of Aelbert Cuyp and the two Ruisdaels, Salomon and his nephew Jacob.

His absences from the studio were more productive than his presence there. In 1822, when he was nineteen years old, two of his sketches made on a tour of Normandy were accepted by the Salon, the annual exhibition instituted by the Academie des beaux-arts, and were sold immediately. At the Salon two years later he was awarded a medal of honour and, what was better still, hearty praise by Camille Corot. Fifty years later, long after Bonington's death, the Fourth Marquess of Hertford (a particular champion of Bonington) bought eleven canvases and twenty-five watercolours, now the largest easily accessible public display of his work, for what was to become the Wallace Collection. It is not surprising that towards the end of 1823 Bonington left the Gros Studio where, in spite of his achievements and his promise, he was still set to work copying casts of Graeco-Roman statues.

As his later travels in Italy would show, his bent was not towards the South; rather he was drawn towards the Gothic North, from Rouen to Bruges and Haarlem: to wooden docks rather than colonnaded seaports; to cobbled lanes rather than marbled arcades; to spires and dormer windows rather than cupolas and coffered ceilings. He was eagerly invited to contribute illustrations to a set of twenty-one volumes, Voyages pittoresques dans l'ancienne France, subsidised by the French government, which were published from 1820 to 1863 (throughout his remaining years and beyond) which the young Monet may have imitated in his early graphic work, exhibited at the Royal Academy in the spring of 2008. Monet's Estuary of the Seine re-aligns the airy grid of cranes, masts and belfries of Bonington's View of Rouen devised forty years previously.

In his quiet but arresting originality, Bonington avoids drama. Misadventures are rare in his coastal scenes, and then easily righted. The low chalk cliffs of his 1826 Coast of Picardy (Wallace Collection) slump into an inlet where a two-master has run aground at ebb-tide. An inshore boat, its dun sails curled like autumnal leaves by sun and brine, attempts an unhurried rescue. The dip of the cliffs leaves the unrigged two-master in relief on the shallow saline flats against a haze of cloud-skim and spindrift. It has been the most temperate of vicissitudes. Two placid shire-horses wait to cross the draining sands and drag the listing ship erect. The painting is suffused by a sense of calm, which Bonington sought above all things.

His Landscape with a Woodcart (Wallace Collection), of the same period. is set on the same littoral plain of the Channel. A sleek stream sidles through mossed stepping-stones. A wagon, having forded the stream, lurches up the bank on silt-clogged wheels, laden with a sun-shot freight of logs, their bark richly crumbled during the haul. Splendour floats across the roseate moisture of the summer haze, then gently settles on the split sides of the timber, and more audaciously blazons a twist of silver on the crook of the arm of a woman chatting to a companion as she sits on the grass near the churned-up bank. Behind them stretch the flat, matted cornfields of Picardy, broken only by the faint uprights of distant steeples and poplar trees.

On his return from one of his sketching tours Bonington fell in with Eugene Delacroix, whom he had first met whilst copying in the Louvre. After a while Bonington became an admiring friend of Delacroix, three or four years his senior, who had already exhibited Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx (Louvre) at the 1822 Salon. What had drawn them into conversation is hard to say, unless it was student camaraderie. Bonington, staid and easygoing, had little in common with the often tempestuous Delacroix, whose art Baudelaire described in Les Phares as a 'lake of blood haunted by dark angels'. What the two acquaintances did share was a love of the tales they found in Shakespeare, Scott and Byron; in Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years' War; and in the twelfth-century Breton romances, leisurely Arthurian adventure stones by Chretien de Troyes. The Francophile Englishman and the Anglophile Frenchman shared Delacroix's studio for four months in the winter of 1825-6. during which Delacroix was working intensely on his Decapitation of Doge Marino Faliero (Wallace Collection), a subject from a tragedy by Byron which Byron perceptively conceded was unactable. The headless body of the Doge, a victim of the Venetian patricians, rolls bleeding down a steep flight of marble stairs.

Regrettably, Bonington was over-impressed by Delacroix, but happily the effect was slight. Delacroix emulated the Eastern scenes so commonplace in his time, particularly those of Napoleon's North African expeditions, and the historical theatricalities of such painters as Paul Delaroche, deviser of The Boy Princes in the Tower, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey and similar lugubrious spectacles. Unlike Bonington, Delacroix crowded his figures together, often in perfunctory landscapes. Transcribing Delacroix's manner in a few of his watercolours now in the Wallace Collection (such as An Odalisque and La Siesta), Bonington was briefly inept, though even in his imitations of Delacroix, Bonington eschewed Delacroix's wildness, cruelty and gore. When drawn to the past, Delacroix favoured assassinations, massacres and slaughter. Bonington preferred Francois I gossiping with his sister, the early novelist Marguerite of Navarre; or visited on his sickbed by his former enemy, the Emperor Karl V; or Henri IV surprised by an Ambassador whilst playing as his young children's horse. Yet however cheerful they are, it cannot be said that Bonington's snatches of historical anecdote were among his masterpieces.

Having become an independent painter, offered more commissions than he could carry out, Bonington regretfully left the studio he had shared with Delacroix for larger quarters under the roof of 11 rue des Martyrs. His enjoyment of that secluded and commodious place lasted only one spring. Although Italy had no appeal for him, his recent friends--officious rich amateurs--believed that a proper artist should visit Italy. His initial resistance overcome, he went there with them for a three months' tour. They found their formerly good-humoured although taciturn companion becoming steadily more morose. That was, no doubt, largely because of his dwindling health (he died of consumption two years later); but it must be added that he disliked grandiose cityscapes, Palladian and most other Neoclassical architecture, and disdained views of historic sights produced as souvenirs de voyage for grand-tourists. Even when, with relief, he reached the watersides of Venice, he made a principle, almost wilfully, of never painting a landmark from the same standpoint as Canaletto. Bonington did not care for the importance of his subject or the exactitude of his portrayal; only for expression, imagination and impact. It is strange that the most percipient statement about Bonington was made by the painter of the time who was most different from him, when Delacroix praised him in a letter of 1861 for his dexterity in watercolour and the lightness of his touch 'by which the eye is charmed independently of the subject or its imitative appeal'.

Bonington returned joyfully to Paris in June 1826, and before long he was back on the northern coast of France. His Sunset in the Pays de Caux (Wallace Collection) of early 1828 was apparently painted from a lower reach of the Seine. He has returned to the land of mists. Far away a church is half-seen across an afterglowing shingle, sea-pooled and dyed blue by a ridge of broken mussel-shells. Their boats at anchor under a fissured cliff, fishermen pick their way home through the orange-streaked damp. An impatient dog gazes back at two women, high-bonnetted, wooden-clogged and neat in their coloured aprons, although too talkative in the dog's opinion. At the picture's edge, amid the bustle of villagers whose livelihood depends on the bounty of the sea, Bonington's characteristic dark thresholds lure the imagination beyond, to the salt wind in the hair and on the lips.

ART NOTES:

'Mr Pope's Villa' by William Turner

There are some 300 canvases and 19,000 works on paper, mostly stored, by William Turner in British public galleries. With such bounty, it seems avaricious to begrudge the sale of his canvas. Mr Pope's Villa in Twickenham, to the American dealer who has just bought it from the private collection at Sudeley Castle (Gloucestershire) for over five million pounds. Only the basement of the villa still exists. Turner painted the original building in 1806, the year before it was pulled down by its new owner. It is said, probably apocryphally, that she was weary of adorers of the poet seeking admission to his shrine. It was later fancifully rebuilt by a retired tea-merchant.

The view Turner chose was from the Ham Lands across the tidal Thames in full flood. The scene looks spacious because of the river's swell around Eel Pie Island nearby, and the slope up to the horizon formed by the woods Pope planted in his garden. Pope bought the villa in 1719. partly out of the profits of E5,000 made by his translation of Homer's Iliad into eighteenth-century couplets. As a bachelor, he was content with a leasehold. The villa was not notably large. Its value lay in its five-acre garden. It was one of a row of buildings, including a tannery and a candle-makers, which would not have sweetened the air. Long demolished, they would have filled the gap, now a small park, on the riverside between the villa and the corner of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill.

The villa was severed from the larger garden by the high road to Kingston and Hampton Court. It ran directly under its windows. In addition there was a spring of water in the cellarage, inauspicious to both the stability of the house and to Pope's weak health. In the words of Samuel Johnson, Pope 'produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage' by digging a tunnel under the road and decorating it with shells and rockeries as a watery cave. Time has worn it out: I have seen more picturesque coal-cellars.

D.B.