They order more pictures in France
Jane Munro
RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON:`ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING' by Patrick Noon Yale, £60, pp.288 When Richard Parkes Bonington died in 1828, one month short of his 26th birth- day, obituarists in London and Paris mourned the passing of one of the most dazzling talents of their respective national schools. Each had legitimate claim to his genius. English-born, and of English descent, Bonington spent the majority of his brief life in this country, but his real artistic formation took place in France after he moved there with his parents in 1817. Along with the accident of his early death, Bonington's artistic dual nationality has been central to his fascination ever since. Predictably, many previous accounts have over-indulged in hypotheses of unfulfilled potential, or unhelpful analogies (`the Keats of painting'), but few have defined satisfactorily his unique place in the history of European Romanticism. Noon's study — the fourth to appear in just over a decade — is the most substantial and rewarding to date. It is a refreshingly restrained assessment of the artist and his work, which also provides a detailed, and much-needed examination of the cross- fertilisation of English and French art in the first decades of the 19th century. The book belongs to the increasingly less
portable genre of biography cum-exhibition catalogue (scholarship of this depth does not travel light), but the author uses the form intelligently, to elaborate visually comparisons with the works of friends and peers such as Delacroix, Turner, Isabey and Huet, and to illustrate important works which, due to the quirks of museum policy, or the understandable reluctance of private owners, were not able to travel to the exhibition which has recently closed at the Yale Center of British Art, Newhaven and opens at the Petit Palais, Paris on 5 March.
Bonington's Romantic credentials are impressive. Admired by Sainte-Beuve and extolled by Gautier, he was also an intimate of Delacroix, with whom he briefly shared a studio. His reward is to have been cast as a solitary, melancholic genius, but, as Noon establishes, he wa's a reasonably sociable and — at least until the last weeks of his life — robust individual, endowed with a self-deprecating humour which makes even one's own pimples a target. By the age of 19, he was self-possessed enough to reject a future as an atelier academic, a course on which he had embarked under the tutelage of Baron Gros, and in 1821 made his first tour round Normandy to paint that quintessentially English subject: the picturesque view. His timing and aptitudes were perfect. In France the craze for recording topography and antiquities which had swept Britain almost half a century earlier was only beginning to manifest itself, and Bonington, schooled in the English watercolour tradition, was more than capable of responding. The earliest works in the exhibition, watercolours and lithographs of ports and monuments in Northern France, found a ready market with dealers and print publishers in Paris, although, as Bonington's friend, James Roberts, remarked, their consciously structured compositions were indebted 'more to art than to nature'. The point at which Boning- ton began to paint in oil has never been clearly ascertained. More problematic. still — as the (falsely assumed) acid test of Detail of A Fishmarket near Boulogne, c. 1824, by Richard Parkes Bonington Romantic landscape painting — is the date of his first outdoor oil sketch. This is some- thing of a connoisseur's minefield, and Noon proceeds with caution, subtracting unlikely candidates from Bonington's oeuvre rather than dabbling in the murky waters of attribution. Visually, his argument that Bonington's early technique was based directly on that of his contempo- rary watercolours is compelling, although somewhat at odds with his assertion that Bonington took easily to oils. Views of Ouistreharn and Calais Jetty (c. 1823-24) suggest a sense of surprise at the canvas's refusal to absorb oil washes with the same ease as paper. Larger oils, such as 'Near Saint-Valery sur-Somme' (1824-25) show how rapidly he gained control of the medi- um, although it is doubtful whether he ever mastered aerial perspective on so grand a scale. Bonington's exraordinarily sensitive handling of tone and colour is most evident in the plein air oil sketches on millboard executed from 1825: the view 'In the Forest of Fontainebleau' (c.1825) is a remarkable orchestration of earth tones, while two sketches executed near Genoa, on Boning- ton's first visit to Italy in 1826, are among the most purely sensuous landscapes in his entire oeuvre.
In the last three years of his life, Boning- ton turned increasingly to figure painting in oils, watercolour and gouache. These are dream-like affairs, rich in colour, and romantically evocative of distance in time or space. For the most part they reveal his `instinctive predilection' for the Middle Ages, and for mediaeval, or mediaevalist, literature, but a few, such as the exquisite `Seated Turk' at Yale (1826), painted in Delacroix's studio, and sent with astonish- ing political insensitivity to an exhibition for the benefit of the besieged Greeks at Missolonghi, betray a marked taste for the exotic. The meaning — or meaninglessness — of these small-scale subject paintings has troubled Bonington's biographers. On the one hand it has been suggested that they were executed with a sense of parody which disguises more profound social, historical or sexual references, on the other that they were purely formal exercises, intended to exist independently of their representation- al meaning. Noon is conciliatory, admitting their technical supremacy, while suggesting that alternative readings fail to understand his literary milieu: which of us shares his familiarity with Prosper de Barante's Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne (1824-28)? His extensive catalogue entries help the 20th-century reader to break some of the codes, and promote admiration for any painter who can combine a subject from Scott with direct visual quotations from sources as disparate at Clouet, Watteau and Delacroix, without descending into pastiche.
Noon's study is a model of rigorous art- historical research: that Bonington's allure withstands this scrutiny is Indicative of his greatness. Like Delacroix we are left to wonder at so many 'charming works in so short a life'.
Jane Munro is Assistant Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
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