Park, Turi
Additional Notes
“A different tradition of landscape painting had arisen in seventeenth-century Italy, lead by Frenchman Claude Lorraine. He was inspired by the warm, even and unchanging light of the countryside around Rome, and used it in his carefully arranged and idealized landscapes….
….Claude’s undisputed eminence in landscape had a powerful fascination for Turner, who was mesmerized in particular by the luminosity of the paintings, the way in which the subtle glows of morning, afternoon and evening were conveyed through the glazes of oil. After studying Claude’s work in the collections of his patrons, Turner’s first trip to Italy in 1819 took on the nature of a pilgrimage to the source of this ideal world.”
History & Techniques of the Great Masters. Turner. William Hardy (2003) Chartwell Books.
Excerpts from the essay “Theatre Country” in Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua, Geoff Park (2000) Victoria University Press
‘ … One initiator of what has become ‘tourism’, Thomas West’s 1778 Guide to the Lakes for ‘Lovers of Landscape Studies’ was deliberately arranged so that ‘the changes of scenes is from what is pleasing, to what is surprising, from the delicate and elegant touches of Claude to the noble scenes of Poussin, and from these to the stupendous ideas of Salvator Rosa’.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, or just before it fatefully, physically entered the Pacific, the English mind had simply not connected scenery-as-beautiful and painting. Nor did the English yet visit places for the express purpose of receiving visual pleasure from them. The picturesque view of nature, of seeing it as scene after scene, each chosen for its capability of being formed into a picture, was not part of British culture until its travellers to Europe encountered the landscapes of Gaspard Poussin, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine.
For Poussin, landscape was a way to reiterate his belief in classical principles; for Rosa, a chance of evoking the strangeness of nature; and for Claude, a means of escape into a romantic dream world.
‘ … As being one of West’s tourists became fashionable, seeing what you stepped up to scenic viewing spots to gaze at became an art. The problem for tourists was the same as that for painters: how to organise what was, in reality, an arc curving in front of you (what the period’s poets like Wordsworth called the ‘circling landscape’) onto a flat plane.
So that such connoisseurs could render this feat of spatial organisation instantly, the Claude Glass was invented: a darkly tinted, convex pocket mirror in which, in West’s words, ‘the tourist could see the prospect condensed and framed, and suffused with the mellow glow of Claude’s visions of Elysium’ — all for the price of requiring you to turn your back on what you had come to see. Condensed and framed, in the moment of capture, its miniaturised ‘picture’ was a private possession.
‘ …. It was the English passion for picturesque scenery, which crossed the world with colonisation schemes, that led to the ‘scenery preservation’ movement in late 19th century New Zealand. The foundation of modern nature conservation, the Scenery Preservation Commission, led by S Percy Smith, used the liminal frontier zone between surveillance and sight-seeing to delineate ‘Scenic Reserves”, ensuring that Maori left their old affiliations with nature and place behind, legislatively emptying the landscape as effectively as any English Enclosure Act’.
____ from the essay “Theatre Country” in Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua, Geoff Park (2000) Victoria University Press
“ … As the great British art writer E H Gombrich has shown, nature could never have become ‘picturesque’ for us unless we had acquired the habit of seeing it in pictorial terms. Percy Smith’s New Zealand search for beautiful natural scenery was an antipodean offspring of the pursuit of picturesque beauty that sent poets and painters, and England’s earliest domestic tourists, to Wordsworth’s Lake District in search of motifs that reminded the art lover of painting in the Poussin and Claude genre.
____ from the essay “A Moment for Landscape” in Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua, Geoff Park (2000) Victoria University Press
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