Surveying the landscapes
A stroll through the northern landscape is on offer at the Laing Art Gallery, as David Whetstone reports
There’s a “sweet” little painting in the Laing’s new ticketed exhibition dedicated to landscapes (that’s landscapes pastoral, industrial, dramatic and, in a few instances, almost incidental).
It’s the word chosen by Clio Lieberman, Laing communications officer, to describe a painting hung in the second room of the exhibition called Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities.
I wouldn’t disagree.
The caption’s not especially sweet but there’s an appealing neatness and naivety to ‘A’ Pit, Backworth – the smoke curling from chimneys, the colliery winding gear, the horses in the field and the workmen with their stovepipe hats and shovels.
Who painted it? Nobody seems to know. It’s attributed to “unknown artist” and cautiously dated 1823-67, the reason being that it shows a stationary engine hauling coal wagons.
Up until 1823, horses would have been used to do the job (perhaps those now enjoying the freedom of the field); after 1867, locomotives.
Whoever did it clearly understood how collieries worked. An early ‘pitman painter’, perhaps?
Anyway, it obviously appealed to someone at the Laing which added the painting to its collection in 1933.
Asked to choose one painting to have at home if it were possible, Clio opts for Dorothy Johnstone’s 1918 portrait of fellow artist Cecile Walton, shown reclining languidly on a hayrick.
This is one of the many paintings from the Fleming Collection of Scottish art whose collaboration with the Laing has made this exhibition particularly extensive and interesting.
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It is the first time the Fleming Collection has mounted a landscape exhibition which is surprising given the age-old appeal of the Scottish countryside to artists and the number of landscape paintings it holds.
Esmé Whittaker, Keeper of Art for Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums, worked with a colleague from north of the border to assemble the exhibition in a way that tells a story of changing attitudes to the landscape.
As the title suggests, the visitor is taken on a journey through the ‘romance’ of pastoral scenes loved by landowning patrons (gathered in the first room) to (in the second) the grittier ‘realities’ of the Industrial Revolution – dams, quarries, a grimy urban dystopia by LS Lowry and ‘A’ Pit, Backworth).
But beneath this overarching theme can be found many points of personal interest, many diversions and stories within stories.
“My co-curator was really keen to borrow the Breughel engraving from the British Museum because there’s a new piece of scholarship around that work,” says Esmé.
It’s one of the first things you see, a pair of 16th Century nautical engravings by Peter Breughel the Elder, one of which, Armed Three Master with Daedalus and Icarus in the Sky, showing what experts now believe to be the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth.
Hung next to it, for comparison, is an oil painting from the Laing collection called The Bass Rock, done in about 1830 by George Balmer.
Now that it seems possible to bring the Breughel into the history of Scottish Art, the Fleming Collection people are more than happy.
And Esmé is happy because women are well represented in the exhibition and not just in the second room where the Dorothy Johnstone portrait is joined by works credited to Joan Eardley, Carol Rhodes and others.
Borrowed from Inverness Museum & Art Gallery is a notable painting done in about 1815 of Loch Ness by Jane Nasmyth (1788 to 1867).
She was taught by her father, Alexander Nasmyth (whose own work, from the Fleming Collection, is displayed close by) and became an accomplished artist, as did sisters Barbara, Margaret, Elizabeth, Anne and Charlotte.
Cecilia Priscilla Cooke’s early 19th Century depiction of Durham Cathedral, part of the Laing collection since 1982, dates from a time when upper class women dabbled in watercolour painting.
“We were really keen to show women artists throughout history,” says Esmé, and it's always tricky with that period because there weren’t as many women working as professional artists.
“Jane Nasmyth was unusual in that she was part of this family of artists but often it was women from aristocratic backgrounds who could get the training. It was very much seen as an accomplishment.
“But we definitely wanted women included.”
Cecilia Priscilla Cooke is believed to have been the sister-in-law of Sir Charles Monck, owner of Belsay Hall.
Here her painting hangs alongside the work of male contemporaries, not a patronising tick-box accomplishment but a work of art.
Asked to choose her ‘take home’ from the 70-or-so pictures on show, Esmé dithers.
“That’s really tricky. I love all the coastal scenes and I do love the Glasgow Boys and Girls (the radical young artists who in the 1880s adopted a documentary style).
“I love the drama of this wall with the dam and the quarries (paintings by Charles Oppenheimer and John Guthrie Spence Smith). But maybe a Glasgow Boys seascape…”
She opts for View of Corrie on Arran by James McLachlan Nairn who became known for painting the working folk who lived in the Scottish island village.
The exhibition ends with more recent creations, including John Kippin’s startling 1991 photograph, Hidden, showing a wrecked fighter plane in the Northumberland National Park, 23% of which is used by the Ministry of Defence.
There’s a fair bit of comparing and contrasting to be done, with John Martin’s The Bard, exhibited in 1817 and showing a defiant poet about to plunge to his death, juxtaposed with a climber on Scafell in Delmar Banner’s painting of more than a century later.
Banner – German born, British based – moved to the Lake District in the 1930s with his wife, the Brazilian sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos. They became friends with Beatrix Potter whose portrait Delmar painted.
To digress… I interviewed Josefina once when she was very old, being struck, I remember, by her strong hands as she worked the clay in the chilly stone hut she called her studio.
She was fascinating company. In her last months she published an account of her friendship with Beatrix Potter. Outliving her husband by 22 years, she died, aged 100, in 2005.
Esmé is pleased to have been able to hang a painting by the ever popular Ralph Hedley – Sharpening the Scythe (1897), owned by the Laing – next to a canvas of similar dimensions from the Fleming Collection, Fieldworkers by Robert Brough.
“It’s nice when you’re working with a curator from another organisation because it enables you to look at things afresh,” she says.
“I think this Hedley is an example of that. It’s much freer than a lot of his works and I liked displaying it alongside a Scottish work influenced by impressionism to show what was happening in art at that period.
“It’s a painting that hasn’t been on display recently.”
As Esmé suggests, this is an exhibition that invites a lot of fresh thinking. It’s well worth a look.
Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities is on until April 26, 2025. For ticket details and opening times go to the Laing Art Gallery website.