William James Blacklock (1816-1858), an oil on canvas, "Blea Tarn and The Langdale Pikes". 17.5 ins x 23.25 ins, signed and dated 1854. . William James Blacklock 1816-1858THE LANGDALE PIKES ABOVE BLEA TARN1854It is no exaggeration to say that William James Blacklock is one of the great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, and perhaps the most remarkable of all of those who devoted themselves to the representation of the Lake District. He is less well known than he should be – the modern ‘rediscovery’ of the artist commenced in 1974 with an insightful article in Country Life by the late Geoffrey Grigson (‘A Painter of the Real Lakeland’, 4 July 1974, pp. 24-26), and was carried forward in a ground-breaking exhibition at Abbott Hall in Kendal, organised by Mary Burkett in 1981 – but on other occasions he has been omitted from landscape surveys, perhaps because of the very individuality of his work which makes them difficult immediately to characterise or readily to place in conjunction with those of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, Blacklock is a most fascinating and rewarding artist, who in the last half-decade or so of his tragically short life painted a small handful of masterpieces which serve as a testament to his deep love and knowledge of Cumberland and the English Lakes.The Blacklock family had been long established in the neighbourhood of Cumwhitton, to the south west of Carlisle, farming there at least since the 1500s. W.J. Blacklock’s father was in fact living in London, where he made his living as a bookseller and publisher, at the time of the painter’s birth, but returned to Cumberland in 1818. The younger Blacklock’s career as an artist commenced when he was apprenticed to the Carlisle engraver and lithographer Charles Thurnham, with whom he later collaborated on a series of prints showing the railway line between Newcastle and Carlisle. W.J. Blacklock enrolled for a period at the Carlisle Academy of Arts, prior to its closure in 1833, working under Matthew Ellis Nutter. In 1836 he returned to London, then aged twenty, living there for the following fourteen years. How he occupied himself at this stage is not known, nor is it clear whether he could rely on the sale of works for a livelihood. Works by him – generally showing north-country landscapes – were exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution. Clearly he gained some reputation on the metropolitan artistic scene, as his landscape paintings were commented upon enthusiastically by J.M.W. Turner, David Roberts and John Ruskin. Much concerning Blacklock’s career, and especially the question of his contact with other artists, is a matter of speculation. His name is largely absent from the diaries, correspondence and memoirs of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, the members of which were in any case much younger than him, but Blacklock would certainly have seen early works exhibited by members of the group and their associates. We know that he was in contact with William Bell Scott, headmaster of the Government School of Design in Newcastle, and who was in turn a close friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was almost certainly by Scott’s introduction or recommendation that Blacklock built up a circle of patrons in the North East. Scott and Rossetti may have hoped to meet Blacklock on the occasion of a walking tour they made together from Newcastle to Carlisle in June 1853. Scott, who like Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter, seems to have recorded a vain attempt to visit the painter in a poem entitled ‘An Artist’s Birthplace’, published in 1854. The verse describes the arrival of two men at the cottage home of a painter who may clearly be recognised as Blacklock: A fit place for an artist to be reared;Not a great Master whose vast unshared toils,Add to the riches of the world, rebuildGod’s house, and clothe with Prophets walls and roof,Defending cities as a pastime – suchWe have not! but the homelier heartier handThat gives us English landscapes year by year.There is his small ancestral home, so gay,With rosery and green wicket. We last metIn London: I’ve heard since he had returnedHomeward less sound in health than when he reached That athlete’s theatre, well termed the graveOf little reputations. Fresh againLet’s hope to find him.The verse corroborates what sparse biographical information we have for the painter (and which derives principally from an article in the Glasgow Evening News, 25 July 1900, entitled ‘An Artist’s Career’ and contributed by Edward Pennington presumably on the basis of information received from the artist’s family, despite forty-two years having passed since his death): the painter had returned to Cumberland because his health was deteriorating, probably as a result of syphilis, but also – according to Scott’s account – because of the professional frustrations and commercial pressures that went with trying to work as an artist in London. In 1850 Blacklock seems to have engaged in a last determined bout of activity as a landscape artist, perhaps fearing that he had not many years remaining to him and wanting to put together a group of works in which his particular artistic principles were to be defined. This small corpus – consisting of views in the Lakes and countryside around Cumwhitton, and all made in a period of about four years – serve as his lasting memorial. Paintings such as Devock Water (Abbott Hall, Kendal), of 1853, and Catsbells and Causey Pike (Tullie House Art Gallery, Carlisle), of 1854, represent timeless images of particular places which speak of the painter’s love for the landscape that he was representing. The present view is of the Langdale Pikes, seen beyond Blea Tarn, and therefore from a vantage-point looking towards the north west, and with the direction of afternoon light from behind the artist’s left shoulder. A shoreline of purple heather and strewn boulders forms the foreground, with a brown-coated fisherman on the left side. E. Lynn Linton, in his book The Lake Country (1864), used an engraving of the same view by W.J. Linton to head his chapter ‘Langdale and the Stake’, describing in his text the mountains seen from this vantage-point at ‘the back of Blea Tarn’: ‘the highest to the right is Harrison Stickle, that to the left Pike o’ Stickle, and the long sweep to the right of Harrison Stickle is Pavey Ark, in the cup or lip of which lies Stickle Tarn’. Harriet Martineau in her 1855 Complete Guide to the English Lakes invoked the place as the scene of one of Wordsworth’s Excursions to dwell upon the Solitary, and also described the remoteness of the location and the ‘very rough road [that] scrambles up from Langdale, by Wall End, to the upland vale where the single farmhouse is, and the tarn’.The atmospheric effect of the painting is beautifully observed, with the forms of the mountain partly suffused in shadow but with other areas brightly lit as cloud shadows sweep over, and with clefts and exposed rock faces recorded with painstaking attention. Blacklock’s particular mastery in the treatment of mountain landscapes depended in great part on his understanding of the constantly fluctuating quality of light, and here especially the scale and structure of the distant ranges are given volumetric expression by the graduated fall of light. Thus the mountain range seems both massive and distant, but at the same times almost tangible and lending itself to close and detailed scrutiny. Martineau commented on a similar optical ambiguity whereby ‘the Langdale Pikes, and their surrounding mountains seem, in some states of the atmosphere, to approach and overshadow the waters [of Windermere]; and in others to retire, and shroud themselves in cloud land’.Blacklock did not work directly from the motif but instead drew landscape sketches in watercolour which later formed the basis of his studio compositions, or perhaps worked largely from memory. He may in addition have used photographs – probably daguerreotypes which in the 1850s were beginning to be made available by commercial photographers – to remind himself of the broad outlines of his chosen subjects (as may be suggested by the way he treats shadows in his paintings, which sometimes seems reminiscent of photographic images). He did not seek the kind of literal transcription of the forms of the landscape that artists influenced by Ruskin attempted in the period, but sought a quintessential representation of topographical type which might be recognised as a timeless record of a hallowed place, treated with an extraordinary intensity of vision. The Langdale Pikes seem to have had a particular hold on the artist’s imagination, as he painted the range on a number of occasions and from different vantage-points. An earlier work showing Blea Tarn and the Langdale Pikes of 1852 is in the collection of a descendant of the artist, while a painting entitled Esthwaite Water and the Langdale Pikes (although in fact showing Elter Water) was commissioned by William Armstrong [later Lord Armstrong, the Newcastle industrialist and arms manufacturer whose house Cragside near Rothbury was built by the architect Richard Norman Shaw] in 1855. Clearly the Lakeland landscape was enormously important to Blacklock. All his exhibited works were of northern settings, and we may be sure that even during the years that he spent in London he will have made frequent visits to Cumberland, and that he believed himself to have as his essential purpose the representation of a beloved North. Analogy may be made between Blacklock and other European artists who like him felt it was their mission to explore and describe a landscape setting which they had known from earliest childhood, feeling such close personal identity with those places as to amount to obsession. His near contemporary Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) never tired of painting landscape and country life subjects set in Ornans in the Jura Mountains of eastern France, and created an extraordinary and indelible imagery of that region. Likewise, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) painted series of views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire in his native Provence so as to capture the essential identity of a topography that was to him living and imbued with vital and personal associations. These were all painters for whom the intimate knowledge and long contemplation of a specific locality was a vital requirement for an art to be vital and true, and who found themselves in the representation of places with which they had long association, as if the landscape forms, light and air, which were the object of their art, retained some kind of subliminal resonance of the pattern of their own lives.Blacklock’s last extraordinary surge of creativity was sadly short lived. By the time the present work was painted, he was seriously afflicted by symptoms of the disease that would kill him. In the first place, he suffered from an inflammation of the eyes that would in due course make him partially blind. In November 1855, having become increasingly erratic in his patterns of behaviour, he was placed in the Crichton Royal Mental Institution in Dumfries, and where he died on 12 March 1858 as a result of ‘monomania of ambition and general paralysis’. Interestingly, the Crichton hospital, under the direction of Dr William Browne, had recently introduced therapies to attempt to aid their deranged inmates including drawing, as happened also at the Royal Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane in London during the time that Richard Dadd was incarcerated there, so Blacklock was able intermittently to continue at least to draw to the end of his life. A number of landscape sketches made at the Crichton are reproduced in Maureen Park’s book Art in Madness – Dr W.A.F. Browne’s Collection of Patient Art at Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, Dumfries, 2010.The Langdale Pikes above Blea Tarn was painted for the artists’ colourman Charles Roberson, probably to a commission and as a pendant to another work of 1854, The Miller’s Homestead (private collection). Whatever professional difficulties Blacklock may have faced in the years that he lived in London, in the 1850s, after his return to Cumwhitton he began to find himself sought after by a small but discriminating circle of patrons. Roberson himself was a significant figure in the establishment of a progressive school of painting in the middle years of the century, because he supplied artists with a range of new and stronger pigments, often derived in their manufacture from industrial processes, and thus aided the move towards more brightly coloured works which was a characteristic of English painting in the period. A degree of rivalry seems to have come about between Blacklock’s would-be patrons, chronicled in the letters that the artist wrote to the Gateshead metallurgist James Leathart (now held as part of the Leathart Papers, University of British Columbia). Roberson’s two paintings are referred to in a letter to Leathart of 2 June 1854, ‘one the same lake as I am going to do for Mr Armstrong – the other a Millers Homestead – the mill looking over a moor & distant hills they are for Mr Roberson the artists colourman’. In September 1855, just weeks before his final incarceration, Blacklock sent off the Lakeland views that he had made for Armstrong and Leathart, and in doing effectively concluded his professional career.Blacklock is an important and intriguing figure who may be regarded both as a pivot between the early nineteenth-century landscape school and the achievements of Romanticism, and the earnest and obsessive innovations of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Perhaps a vital factor in our understanding and appreciation of the particular character of Blacklock’s art is his knowledge of historic schools of painting. Living in London in the late 1830s and 40s he would have had the opportunity to study the works in the National Gallery. It has been suggested that it was the unveiling of works long concealed under layers of discoloured varnish as a result of Charles Eastlake’s cleaning programme of in the mid-1840s that prompted Blacklock to adopt brighter and more luminous colours. A further possibility is that he made a European tour at some point, seeing for himself works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also perhaps making contact with working artists in France or Italy. Only the slightest indication survives of Blacklock’s interest in the work of the Old Masters – in a letter to Leathart of 20 September 1854 he looks forward to hearing about the works of art that the latter had seen in the course of a Continental tour. Nonetheless, broad stylistic analogies may be drawn between the landscape paintings of Blacklock and those of other British artists who had visited Europe in their formative years. William Dyce, for example, who had visited Italy in 1825-26 and there made contact with the German Nazarene painters in Rome. Something of the clarity of light and simplicity of expression, along with a particular feeling for colour effects which are peaceful and never strident, that characterises Dyce’s pure landscapes, is also infused into the less well known works of Blacklock, and may perhaps likewise be indebted to a knowledge of European schools of painting.Christopher Newall
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