Breath of fresh air
Laura Gascoigne celebrates the neglected genius of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–28), an English painter of French seascapes who fell between two schools
Laura Gascoigne celebrates Richard Parkes Bonington, neglected master of the seascape
IN the autumn of 1817, the French painter Louis Francia, recently returned to his native Calais from London where he had been honing his skills in the English art of watercolour, spied a tall, thin teenager sketching on the quay. Peeking over the lad’s shoulder, he was immediately struck by the quality of his watercolour sketches—and not surprised to discover that he was English.
The lad’s name was Richard Parkes Bonington and his parents had just moved to Calais to set up a tulle-manufacturing company, joining an exodus of Nottingham lacemakers put out of business by mechanisation. Richard Bonington Snr was not a lacemaker by trade; he had previously thrown up a sinecure as Nottingham’s gaoler to pursue a precarious career as an artist and drawing master, before selling up to try his luck at tulle- and lacemaking across the Channel.
For his 15-year-old son, who had inherited his father’s passion for art, the move from land-locked Nottingham to the Calais coast, with its exhilarating expanse of sea and sky, was a formative experience: in a few short years, he would become one of the greatest, if least celebrated, painters of seascapes in European art.
‘Who is R. P. Bonington?’ an English critic demanded only eight years later on coming across his paintings at the British Institution. ‘We never saw his name in any catalogue before and yet here are pictures that would grace the foremost name in landscape art.’
Anyone coming across his paintings for the first time today will probably have exactly the same thought. Represented by a sprinkling of works in British public collections, Bonington is still not a household name. His tragically short life gave him little time to consolidate his fame and, unlike van Gogh, he left few personal letters. What we know of him has had to be pieced together from snippets of other people’s recollections.
Who is R. P. Bonington? These pictures would grace the foremost name in landscape art
One of the earliest is by Eugène Delacroix, who, as a student copying works in the Louvre, recalled ‘a tall adolescent in a short jacket, who was making, also alone and silently, watercolour studies, in general after Flemish landscapes’. By then, Bonington was enrolled in the atelier of the classical-history painter Antoine-jean Gros, making laborious tonal drawings after casts of classical sculptures. To a rebellious young man used to being outdoors painting from Nature, this regime felt stifling, especially when he was refused permission to draw from life. In September 1821, he bunked off with a friend on a tour of Normandy, the first of what would become regular sketching trips on the North Sea coast.
For a young French artist of the period starting out on his career, a sketching tour of Italy’s Roman ruins was the done thing; Bonington set off in the opposite direction and took a perverse delight in making watercolour drawings of pile drivers at Rouen. His extraordinary mastery of the medium is demonstrated three years later in a lively scene of Fishing Boats and a Paddle-steamer, Boulogne (1824–25), with its dazzlingly handled choppy seas. Like his hero Turner,
Bonington enjoyed enlivening a traditional scene with a modern detail: paddle steamers were a new addition to Channel crossings.
His picturesque drawings and prints of medieval buildings, showing everyday life continuing in their shadow, were already in demand for illustrated travel guides and private albums. But the subjects that would make his name were the coastal landscapes that had long been favourites with English collectors and were now—together with sea bathing—becoming fashionable in France. Some of these had been accepted for the Salon, but it was in the windows of private galleries in Paris that their freshness and naturalism caught the eye of his French contemporaries, striking such a chord with the young Jean-baptiste-camille Corot that he decided there and then to become a painter.
In the eyes of the French art establishment, this sort of painting was a minor art form. Although space was given to naturalist landscapes in the Salon, for upholders of the grand classical tradition, representations of Nature were not enough: art, in their view, had a moral obligation to convey lofty ideals. Such traditionalist assumptions would be shaken at the 1824 Salon when a contingent of 30 British artists crashed the French party. Only one, Sir Thomas Lawrence, had been formally invited; the others, nearly all landscape painters, were represented by modern art dealers with their fingers on the pulse who had stocked up on British paintings in advance.
In what became notorious as ‘the English Salon’, gold medals were awarded to Copley
Fielding, John Constable and Bonington and Lawrence was honoured with the Légion d’honneur. No English works were acquired for the ministry, but they had made their mark. ‘To go to the suburbs and reproduce faithfully the first field one comes to is to abuse painting,’ spluttered one disgusted traditionalist, but others saw which way the wind was blowing.
The critic Auguste Jal singled out Bonington as ‘an Englishman transported to Paris whither he had brought the faith… He has created a mania. For some time the amateurs have judged only by him; he has proselytes and imitators’. He was 21.
The following year, Bonington rode the French wave of Anglomania across the
Channel, importing his seemingly effortless brand of naturalism to London, where its swift success rattled older rivals. Constable, pushing 50 and still awaiting election to the Royal Academy, was particularly narked when the young expatriate, half his age, was welcomed with open arms by British connoisseurs and championed by the keeper of the National Gallery. ‘There is moral feeling in art as in everything else,’ he grumbled, even after Bonington’s death; ‘it is not right in a young man to assume great dash—great compleation— without study or pains. “Labour with genius” is the price the Gods have set upon excellence.’
Constable’s resentment, if understandable, was unjust. Bonington’s facility was never facile: his impression of effortless spontaneity —his deceptive ‘dash’—was the product of painstaking preparation. However practised his technique, he was never slick, even after progressing—again seemingly effortlessly —from watercolours to oils in about 1823. He might have added the odd dab of impasto to a sunlit cloud or white chalk cliff in On
the Coast of Picardy (1826), but he scrupulously avoided any hints of bravura.
The trails of surf dragged over the wet beach in La Ferté (1825–27), patterning the sand like scalloped lace, are not an expressionist
flourish; they are a precise rendering of an observable effect. In late watercolours such as Sunset in the Pays de Caux (1828), with its heightened contrasts of tone and colour, Bonington echoes Turner, but in his oil paintings, he stays faithful to the Flemish landscapes Delacroix saw him copying in the Louvre. In the shimmering View on the
Seine, Morning (1825–26), tone and colour are perfectly calibrated to communicate a mood of seductive serenity: a feeling of ‘compleation’, pace Constable. The appearance of perfection is no accident: there is no perfection without perfectionism.
In a late memoir, Delacroix, who befriended Bonington in London in 1825 and invited him to share his Paris studio on their return, testified to his friend’s conscientiousness. ‘I never tired of admiring his marvellous grasp of effects and the facility of his execution,’ he recollected; ‘not that he was readily satisfied. On the contrary, he frequently redid completely finished passages which had appeared wonderful to us; but his talent was such that he instantly recovered with his brush new effects as charming as the first.’
Under Delacroix’s influence, Bonington branched out that winter into figure paintings of historical and literary subjects. Compositions such as Don Quixote in his Study (1825–26), with its pile of tarnished armour dumped on the foreground floor, allowed him to indulge his love of antiquarian detail. Owing more to the influence of Rembrandt than Turner, this picture’s dark interior is as shadowy and cluttered as the artist’s beach scenes are full of light and space.
With success came a hectic work schedule. The closure of his father’s business in 1825 left Bonington, at 23, as the family wage earner, in no position to turn down the growing numbers of commissions for paintings, prints and illustrations. His ambition was that, by scaling up his oil paintings to the size of the
grandes machines acquired by the French state, he could get his prices up and his work rate down, but his subjects didn’t lend themselves to the grand manner and, noted Delacroix, he grew depressed. The melancholic look in his Rembrandtesque self-portrait may have been more than a charming affectation.
The following spring, on a tour of Italy, he succumbed to bouts of ‘maladie noire’.
His companion Charles Rivet wrote home to his parents from Venice: ‘My travel companion is a good boy but not always gay.’ It didn’t help that it rained almost incessantly; the vibrant
The Castelbarco Tomb, Verona in sunlight was painted in his studio from a sketch.
On his return to Paris, the strain started to tell. In a letter that October, a postscript complaining of being ‘pestered morning and evening’ was hurriedly scratched out. The following June, a day out painting on the Seine put him in bed with suspected sunstroke, but he didn’t bounce back; by July he was showing symptoms of consumption, too weak to do more than draw views of Paris from a cabriolet. The 5in by 8in watercolour The Undercliff, which would normally have been the work of a few hours, took him two days; exemplifying genius with labour, it is his most romantic image. It would be his last.
His desperate parents took their only son to London to see a quack who advertised as a lung specialist, but any treatment he tried had no effect. On September 23, 1828, a month before his 26th birthday, Bonington was dead.
In the wake of his funeral, Bonington mania flared. The English claimed him for the British School; across the Channel, even his fiercest critics claimed him for the French. Somewhere along the way, however, this supremely gifted child of two artistic traditions—‘without prejudices, without a school, almost without a country to call his own’, as one French fan put it—fell between two schools. There has been no major survey of Bonington’s work in his native country since 1965. The paintings Delacroix compared to ‘a type of diamond that flatters and ravishes the eye’ remain scattered through different collections, but they still sparkle.