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TOPOGRAPHY

LANDSCAPE PAINTING

and enchantment

LANDSCAPE GALLERY 01
LANDSCAPE GALLERY 02

LANDSCAPE GALLERY 03
LANDSCAPE GALLERY 04
LANDSCAPE GALLERY 05

 

LANDSCAPE GALLERY 01- PRINTS
LANDSCAPE GALLERY 02- PRINTS

JAPANESE LANDSCAPES

 

ESTATES AROUND MOSCOW, prints and objects

THE VIEW PAINTERS OF EUROPE, and Canaletto; the use of the Camera Ottica

 

 

VUITTON COLLECTION OF LUGGAGE, Musee des Arts Decoratifs

 

STUDIO SPECIAL NUMBER, British watercolour

STUDIO SPECIAL NUMBER, EARLY ENGLISH WATERCOLOUR DRAWING

SIND BRITEN HIER? catalogue notes with John Gage

John Gage, A Decade of English Naturalism, 1810-1820, exhibition catalogue

Walter Gibson, Pleasant Places. Rustic Landscape Breughel to Ruysdael

 

FOUR DRAWINGS OF ROCKS, ANON., GERMAN C1820, MULLEN COLLECTION

ENGLISH VIEWS (1840'S STEEL)

LADBROOKE'S LITHOGRAPHS OF EAST ANGLIAN CHURCHES

A TREASURY OF VIEWS OF KENT (W.H.IRELAND)

PRINTS OF DIEPPE

AIKIN'S MANCHESTER, four galleries 1796

SIX LANDSKIPS FROM NATURE by ?George Smith

J.M.W.Turner THE RIVERS OF FRANCE, a selection

J.W.BARBER, MASSACHUSETTS TOWNS 1840

A SELECTION OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DUTCH LANDSCAPE PRINTS

LINCOLN IN 1836, WOOD AND STEEL ENGRAVINGS, PUBLISHED BY JOHN SAUNDERS

THOMAS ALLOM, W.H.BARTLETT AND OTHERS, CALEDONIA ILLUSTRATED 92 STEEL ENGRAVINGS OF SCOTTISH SCENERY

GIUSEPPE ZOCCHI, Drawings of Rome, Florence etc, sale catalogue

ATHENS AND ITS VICINITY

PAINTINGS OF GREECE

SOUVENIRS DE LA SUISSE 1829, A selection from 100 Vues

 

TOWN TOPOGRAPHIES 01

TOWN TOPOGRAPHIES 02
TOWN TOPOGRAPHIES 03
TOWN TOPOGRAPHIES (Joseph Haydn)
MONUMENTAL TOPOGRAPHIES 01
MONUMENTAL TOPOGRAPHIES 02
AMSTERDAM (Afbeeldinge van de Verscheyde Vergrootinge van Amsterdam met der Zeber Voornamste Gebousven: 1622)
Ninham's Gates of Norwich 1861
Winkles's Cathedrals

DE PRANGEY, Grenada and the Alhambra 1837

 

RUDOLPH ACKERMANN PUBLISHER
THOMAS AND WILLIAM DANIELL
GABRIEL LORY, GENEVA TO MILAN

IMAGES OF EXPLORATION,

 

SINGLES

anonymous artist, river landscape, etching

Isaac Taylor, frontispiece to Cunninghams' Poems chiefly Pastoral 1766

anon, A View of the New River Head, 1740's

John Petherick, Bute Furnace, Rhymney c1830

John Warwick Smith, Coppermines, 1790

J.P. Hackert, View of St.Peter's Rome 1776

Karl Schinkel, Schloss Prediama near Trieste 1816, View of St.Peter's Rome 1776

BARTLOW HILLS, ESSEX, evidence of burials
THE BAD LANDS OF WHITE RIVER DAKOTA

DANIELL, ORIENTAL SCENERY, THE CUTTAB MINAB
DANIELL, AFRICAN SCENERY 1804/5

Bonington, The Fountain of the Cross at Rouen 1827 litho.
Dauzats, Maisons a Chaudesaignes 1831 litho.

Eugen Ciceri. La Marche aux Poissons a Troyes 1857 litho.
Stourton Tower (from Robinson's of Bristol Catalogue)

A PLATE FROM NATTES VIEWS OF BATH 1806

J.M.W.TURNER, FROM PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES 1838

Lefebvre, Excursion to the Normany Coast... Paris 1823-5, Etretat

Claude Lorrain, print after a drawing in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire, a piper on the river bank

Two robed figures in a boat with distant shoreline

Michele Marieschi, Prospects of Venice, Venice 1741

Daniel Stopendahl, Scene on the River Vecht, Amsterdam 1719

Salomon Kleiner , street scene in Vienna, Augsburg, 1724-37

"View of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius Monday morning August the 9th 1779." From William Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei

Merian and Zeiller, Topographiae, a view of Frankfurt 1660 -1726

RUISDAEL, View of the Hekelveld Amsterdam in Winter (Bute Collection)

PAUL SANDBY,Two dawings of trees from the sale of the Bute Collection

PAUL SANDBY,Lodge at Luton from the sale of the Bute Collection

BOOKS AND PRINTS FROM THE PANOS GRATSOS COLLECTION Sotheby's 1990 (Greece)

PAUL SANDBY,Lodge at Luton from the sale of the Bute Collection

W.COMBE, Langley ware on the Thames 1794-6 Aquatint

Boydell's Picturesque Scenery of Norway 1820 Aquatint

Moore and Marryat, Rangoon Views

 

 

The word TOPOGRAPHY in most definitions seems to entail the recording and visualisation of local detail in landscape, human activity (architecture and the economy) and the unfolding of people's lives. Artists described as Topographers were, it was understood of an inferior professional status and aesthetic achievement to those artists who filtered the landscape through their own subjective sensibility.

Cataloguing watercolour drawings for the British Council exhibition in Munich it struck me being perfectly possible at the time of the making of the image to combine a businesslike attitude with extremes of interpretation. Prints and Drawings were deliberately aimed at a clientele who were familiar with the tourist spots of Europe - a celebrated Battle, a place where the Coach stopped for the passengers to view a much vaunted vista. Tourists' Diaries revealed how fixed was that itinerary, and how artists, seeking to sell their work, were willing to work to this constraint. Given the fixities then how wildly at variance were the productions of the British Landscape Artists who celebrated the Lakes, Mountains and crumbling Cathedrals of this Kingdom, the sublimities of continental Europe (Boney permitting) and the exotic otherness of Distant Parts, with their terrifying Elephants, scintillating Ice Flows and ominous citizenry.

Only in scanning examples from the Topographical Colour Books did I begin to realise how much lyrical feeling pervaded the Topographical image, how many eccentric details were included in human dress and behaviour, and how dreamlike the Travel images were, undistorted by Flies, Unreasonable Heat, Banditti and Bedbugs that I for one associate with Holidays. I remember that a major collector of these Topographical Colour Plate books was the journalist and cricket commentator John Arllott. This is for me what travelling should be, enjoying a glass of wine by the the fire scrutinising an artificiality of place in the form of an illustrated book.

Stylistically there is favouring of the linear, the colour infill and the semblance of an optical reality (Camera Lucida, Obscura) while all along the observer's eye is lured deeper into this aquatint confection.

 

 

 

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