Genus Loc
ELEMENTOS NÚCLEO
1.4.3 Primer Lugar Concurso del Plan CHA en Asunción
[Callcott] painted everything tolerably, and nothing excellently; he has given us no gift, struck for us no light, and though he has produced one or two valuable works ... they will, I believe, in future have no place among those considered representative of the English School.1
John Ruskin’s withering assessment of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Au- gustus Wall Callcott (Figs. 75 and 76) was an inevitable consequence of his strong preference for Callcott’s contemporary, J.M.W. Turner, particularly coming as it did in the third edition of Modern Painters (1846).2 Callcott died in 1844, and so was spared the humiliation of being described as an artistic non-entity by the man rapidly becoming the foremost art critic of the nineteenth century. It is not the object of this chapter to evaluate the impact of Ruskin’s assessment on the reputation of Callcott, but the last sentence of the above quotation was certainly prophetic, if not causal. Despite enjoying a long and distinguished career in which he frequently garnered much greater accolades than Turner, with only three excep- tions Callcott has, since his death, merited only the briefest of references in surveys of nineteenth-century British art or school of landscape painting.3 These generally
1John Ruskin,Modern Painters, 3rd ed., vol. I (London, 1846) p. 93.
2It is widely accepted that, from its inception, Modern Painters was conceived by the author as a robust defence against the widespread criticism that had been levelled at Turner by multiple critics. What distinguishes the third edition of the work from the first and second, however, is its tone. Although there was a difference of less than five years between the publication of the first and third editions of the first volume, the criticisms in the third edition that are levied against Turner’s contemporaries, many of whom were friends of Ruskin’s father, are absent in the first and second editions.
follow the same pattern: following a brief biography, his major works are cited and the conclusion is drawn that he was a mere follower - even at times pasticheur - of Turner. Such a reductive analysis has severely diminished the importance of a man who was admired by both his artistic peers and the leading connoisseurs of the early nineteenth century for his knowledge, judgement and taste, and who stood for President of the Royal Academy in 1830.4 Although he failed to garner the requisite number of votes, his merit was recognised by Queen Victoria and, more significantly in the context of this thesis, Prince Albert, when Callcott was knighted in 1837 and subsequently given the coveted position of Keeper of the Royal Collection.
The monographic literature on Callcott comprises only two works.5 The first is James Dafforne’sPictures by Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, R.A., with a Biographical Memoir of 1875, which is primarily distinguished by the lack of information about its subject. The biographical sketch that Dafforne provided of Callcott is in essence a compilation of the obituaries of the painter published in theThe Athenaeum and Art-Union, which Dafforne may himself have written in the first place.6 Other ma- terial he cites as having consulted includes Charles Robert Leslie’sAutobiographical Recollections, published in 1860, and Richard and Samuel Redgrave’sA Century of Painters of 1866. A number of the factual errors made by Dafforne, particularly in relation to Callcott’s continental tours, can most likely be attributed to the fact that the vast majority of primary material relating to the painter seems to have re- mained with his descendants until the latter half of the twentieth century.7 Dafforne Times in 1836, where it was stated that “to look at Callcott’s “Trent in the Tyrol” after Turner’s “Mercury and Argus” is as cool and refreshing as iced champagne after mulligatawny.” Quoted in David Blayney Brown (hereafter referred to as Brown),Augustus Wall Callcott, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 1981) p. 45. A further comment on Callcott’s lack of longevity is the fact that he does not appear in any edition of Pilkington’sA General Dictionary of Painters. He was, however, the subject of a British Institution retrospective in 1845.
4This point is laboured time and time again in the literature on Callcott; see his obituaries in The Athenaeum(30th November 1844) pp. 1098-1099 andThe Art-Union, 7 (1845) p. 15.
5There is also a solely graphic record of Callcott’s work: Thomas C. Dibdin,Sir Augustus Wall Callcott’s Italian and English Landscapes. Lithographed by T.C. Dibdin (London, 1847).
6James Dafforne (1803/4-1880) joined the staff of the Art Union in 1845 (Callcott died in November 1844, and his obituary in that publication appeared in 1845) and was a contributor to it for thirty-five years. He wrote a number of ‘Lives’ of Victorian artists, including C.R. Leslie, Turner and Landseer.
7It would seem, however, that Dafforne did make an effort to find this material; when writing about Callcott’s continental tours, he stated that he knew that Callcott had “visited continental countries on more than one occasion, and yet it does not appear that he left behind him any records of any kind concerning the people with whom he associated or the places he visited.” Dafforne, 1875, p. 18. It is by no means certain as to how hard Dafforne looked, but one would presume that an assiduous biographer would have approached his subject’s great-nephew, the painter John Callcott Horsely (1817-1903). The material now kept by the Bodleian and the Courtauld, comprising the Callcotts’ honeymoon journals amongst other correspondence, came from the collection of Mrs. Nancy Strode, Callcott Horsley’s granddaughter. Thus it would seem as though Callcott Horsley had no interest in sharing his uncle’s material with Dafforne, a supposition seemingly supported by the fact that Dafforne’s biography is not mentioned in Callcott Horsley’s own memoirs, the
did, however, perceptively write about the peculiarity of the paucity of references to Callcott in the published lives of his contemporaries, such as those of Turner, Constable, Leslie and Etty, to name but a few: “this seems almost inexplicable, considering the position Callcott occupied among his brother-artists, and the uni- versal respect in which he was held by all who were acquainted with him.”8. Perhaps one explanation for this lies with Callcott’s character (most reports of him highlight his taciturnity) and the - by all accounts - quite serious recurring illness that seems to have plagued the last fifteen years of his life.9
The sole twentieth-century published study of Callcott and his oeuvre is an exhibition catalogue by David Blayney Brown (derived from the monographic doc- toral thesis on Callcott by that author), which constitutes the first and only serious modern attempt to evaluate and assess Callcott’s work.10 The exhibition com- prised only seventeen works by Callcott, but Brown’s primary aim was to spotlight Callcott’s relationship with Turner and, consequently, add to the existing under- standing of the artistic milieu within which Turner operated. This methodological framework, combined with Brown’s analysis of the primary material then at the Ash- molean Museum (now in the Bodleian Library), offers an infinitely more scholarly and complete account of Callcott’s life and career. However, despite his knowledge of the Bodleian travel journals, even Brown largely overlooked one of Callcott’s most interesting artistic projects, as have the majority of scholars of the revival of interest in the Italian primitives.11 This is the co-publication with his wife Maria in 1835 of the concise but, importantly, first English account of Giotto’s frescoes decorating the Arena Chapel at Padua.12 This is perhaps a more surprising omission in the scholarly literature given that a wealth of contextual primary information survives, and has been in the public domain for the past thirty years. The aim of this chapter Recollections of a Royal Academician(London, 1903).
8Dafforne, 1875, p. 18
9For instances of Callcott’s taciturnity, see Redgrave and Redgrave, 1866, p. 376 and John Callcott Horsley, 1903, p. 25. Callcott’s wife, Maria, referred in her journal to a serious illness during the couple’s stay in Venice in 1828 that appears to have indisposed Callcott for a number of days, and there are brief references to his ill-health in the autobiographies of Wilkie and Leslie.
10See note 3.
11However, Brown himself stated that the exhibition was unashamedly biased towards Callcott’s artistic production prior to his marriage and his artistic relationship with Turner. He did, however, devote two chapters of his doctoral thesis - David Brown,The Life and Work of Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, RA (1779-1844), unpublished Ph.D. Thesis (Leicester, 1979) - to Callcott’s marriage, the honeymoon and the remaining period between those events and his death, in which the Giotto publication is discussed, but not fully analysed. The other significant piece of scholarship on this Callcotts’ honeymoon and related artistic activities is an introduction to a microfilm edition of Maria’s four honeymoon journals, co-authored by Brown and Christopher Lloyd: David Brown and Christopher Lloyd,The Journal of Maria, Lady Callcott, 1827-8 (Oxford: Oxford Microform Publications, 1981) pp. 1-16.
12Brown referenced the Giotto publication as the fruit of Maria Callcott’s honeymoon, but there is no recognition of her husband’s contribution to the work. Brown, 1981, p. 16.
is therefore to offer an analysis of the Callcotts’Description of the Chapel of the An- nunziata dell’Arena; or, Giotto’s Chapel, in Padua (hereafter referred to simply as Description) and the source material from which it derived. It will then attempt to situate the Callcotts’ publication within the matrix of other works on the primitives in the early decades of the nineteenth century and to assess its impact or influence on contemporary and later artistic responses to early Italian art.