William McTaggart, The Storm, credit Wikipedia
Romance to Realities, The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities, an exhibition reviewed by William Hartley
This is the second exhibition held at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery in 2024. Romance to Realities is a ticketed event which chronicles two hundred years of landscape painting in the north of England and Scotland. It covers town and country, land and sea and how these have changed. The aim is to illustrate the displacement of communities and shifting identities. Done in partnership with the Fleming Collection which holds the largest collection of Scottish art outside a public institution, the exhibition contains work by artists some of whom may be less well known south of the border.
Entering the gallery the Scottish theme is established early on with George Blackie’s magnificent study Tantallon Castle, Caithness, one of the country’s more obscure fortresses.The theme is sustained by John Wilson Carmichael’s Country House in the Highlands, illustrating the move to a less defensive style of living in those parts. A return to the past comes via Walter Hugh Paton’s Craigmillar Castle: another romantic ruin softened by a pastoral scene in the foreground.Viewing these pictures it is easy to understand the Victorian fascination with all things Scottish and how this was to grow throughout the nineteenth century.
The Lake District isn’t overlooked: some works displayed here seem more like the Alps, with sheep on vertiginous crags and climbers who appear to have reached the top of the world. How the Victorians must have loved taking the train north, to experience at first hand what had previously been achievable only by a long and laborious journey.
The older works in the exhibition are not by any means focussed exclusively on the uplands. For instance, there is a water colour on display by Thomas Scott entitled Border Landscape.This depicts an agricultural scene, with not a single peak or crag in sight. Here we see the harvest being laboriously gathered by hand and a reminder that Northumberland and the Borders are rich farming country. Similarly, there is John Richie’s A Border Fair painted in 1865. It is believed to represent the long vanished Stagshaw Bank Fair and is a picture so teeming with life and multiple activities that it probably needs a second viewing to fully appreciate the artist’s achievement.
Then the visitor is brought up to date via a living artist. Peter Howson emerged in the 1980s; his pictures often explore working class lives with themes of violence and inner turmoil. The Brink is a bold, dark, imagined landscape with a female figure in the foreground; a disturbing picture which demands close attention. Howson, a former war artist, painted the picture in 1992 and it shows that this exhibition is not all dreamy landscapes tinged with sentimentalism.
Another picture with the power to disturb is William McTaggart’s Machrihanish Bay. Ostensibly it is a fine seascape but on closer examination possesses an eerie quality. McTaggart was clearly capable of capturing the moods of sea and sky in a style influenced by the Impressionists. However, in this painting the figures in the foreground are superimposed in a semi-transparent way which creates a transient, almost supernatural presence, quite unlike any other people-on-a-beach picture. Amidst so many attractive and rather more standard paintings, this may be the one which stays in the visitor’s mind after they have left the gallery. In a way it anticipates the change from nineteenth century Romanticism and a good example would be William Crozier’s Edinburgh From Castle Street. This is a bold, sharper edged work, definitely lacking any hint of glowing softness. Painted as recently as 2013 and done in the Cubist style, it is every bit as good a piece of townscape as any of the Victorian examples in the exhibition.
The landscape is depicted in a starker, more expressionistic fashion by John Bellamy. The Ettrick Shepherd is an arresting piece of work; the subject standing behind his flock glares warily out of the picture. During the course of his career Bellamy had visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was said to have had a profound effect on him. This is a haunting picture: the shepherd and his tiny flock standing on an anonymous Highland hilltop.
The urban scene isn’t neglected. Some of the works on display have captured people caught in the grimness of northern industrial labour. Of particular interest is a painting by an anonymous artist entitled A Pit Backworth. This is a primitive piece of work which actually helps to show the operation of a colliery. It depicts a point just before the use of steam power became widespread in the mining industry. In the foreground horses are at work moving the coal wagons, a reminder that mining is another form of resource exploitation, just like agriculture, with which it remained closely allied, until it expanded and became an industry in its own right.
Perhaps no modern artist had a greater feel for the urban-industrial landscape than LS Lowry. An example of his work also appears in the exhibition, entitled River Scene. Whilst the location is unknown, Lowry did visit the North East. Certainly, the cotton mills that characterise so much of his work are absent from the picture. This is a river where a colliery headframe is present in one corner, suggesting that the inspiration was the Tyne.
Again going forward in time there is Carol Rhodes’ 2001 painting Trees and Woods depicting those forgotten areas, places around the fringes of airports and reservoirs. Elsewhere James Bateman’s picture The Lime Burner reinforces the one time link between the industrial and agricultural. Lime was needed for fertilizer to be spread on the fields. In order to boost productivity it had to be available in quantity and so coal was required for this purpose.
The final section of the exhibition looks at how 20th century landscape painting sees the interplay of traditional ideals and contemporary art. This is an exhibition which has something for everyone. Romance to Realities takes the visitor through the pastoral and then on into the darker realities of industrial life.
William Crozier, Edinburgh From Castle Street, credit Wikimedia Commons
Romance to Realities is at the Laing Gallery Newcastle until 26th April 2025
William Hartley is a Social Historian
