Watercolour winners
Laura Gascoigne
Coat may have been the foundation of Newcastle's fortunes, but its Laing Art
Gallery 100 this year — was founded on sand. The sand, carried as ballast by returning coalers, supplied the city's glassmaking industry, which in turn supplied the beer-bottling plant of 19th-century Forfarsh ire-born entrepreneur Alexander Laing. At the end of his life the wealthy vintner repaid his adoptive city with the gift of a gallery, which opened with a loan exhibition on 13 October 1904.
Over the past century the Laing has built up its own holdings of British 18thand 19th-century art, including the world's largest collection of paintings by local lad John Martin, born just up the Tyne at Haydon Bridge. It has also amassed some 4,000 watercolours — one of the best provincial collections in the country — which, thanks to a £430,000 centenary refit, now have an exhibition space of their own in the Barbour Watercolour Gallery, recently opened with a display of 60 of the best.
There's nothing like a visit to a provincial gallery to remind one that the British public actually likes art. On the day I went the Barbour was fairly buzzing with people peering and pointing — bad manners anywhere other than a gallery, where it proves you're looking properly at the pictures. And these pictures offer plenty to peer and point at. Not all are top-notch, as is inevitable in a mixed hang where works by Rowlandson, Gainsborough, Girtin and Turner are interspersed with the sort of topographical views dismissed by Fuseli as 'the last branch of uninteresting subjects'. But it has to be remembered that, pre-jet age, these modest pictures performed the useful function of punching little holes in the parlour wall through which the wingchair traveller could escape to exotic destinations, from the Alhambra Palace, courtesy of David Roberts, to a harem in Constantinople, courtesy of John Frederick Lewis, with unlimited stop-offs at Welsh gorges and Neapolitan bays courtesy of just about everyone. And unless they were unwise enough to pick Turner as their tour guide, patrons could count on an unbroken spell of good weather, bathing everywhere from Barnard Castle to the Colosseum in a regulation golden Italianate glow.
For some works the purpose-built gallery has come too late: their glow has faded to that weak-tea colour to which all watercolours default on exposure to light. But several gems have kept their sparkle. There's a beautifully simple Francis Towne of a 'Bridge and Waterfall near Llyngwellyn' (1777) and a fresh, broad view of 'Holy Island' (1808) by John Varley. There's a glittering late Girtin of `Morpeth Bridge' (1802) at evening in which slanting sunlight slips under purple cloud to pick out patches of red roof tiles and peeling whitewash, warming the riverbank where two idling figures tease a dog with the promise of throwing a stick. There's a dashing view of Dunstanburgh Castle (1798-1800) by a 23-year-old Turner, whipping up his habitual storm in a teacup and shovelling tectonic plates about to rearrange the foreground crags to his satisfaction — though this is nothing to Gainsborough's liberties with the landscape in a spirited sketch of carters crossing a gorge which is clearly nothing more than a candlelit construct of stones and broccoli spears on his studio table.
But the painter who really pushed the envelope of topographical invention was John Martin, whose spectacular oils of 'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' and The Bard' dominate the Laing's refurbished 18/19th-century gallery. In the Barbour Gallery he proves that watercolour is no bar to a successful marriage of the lurid with the morbid. His 1833 painting 'The Last Man' — illustrating a baleful dirge by Thomas Campbell — is a pocket apocalypse. Under a sanguine sky on a cliff top strewn with corpses, overlooking a chasm in whose depths can be discerned the dim forms of blasted trees, ruined temples and dismasted ships, the sole survivor of the human race harangues the heavens. We've reached rock-bottom. We expect no less from Martin. What we don't expect from him is a sunny ramble through a 'Landscape with Figures on a Stile' (1840), but while his apocalyptic visions pulled in the crowds, it was pastoral potboilers such as this that paid the rent.
How times have changed. Who could have predicted that of all the smoothpainting peddlers of Victorian fantasies in the Laing's collection the one to keep his finger on the popular pulse would be this native north-eastern fire-and-brimstone merchant, the patriarch of modern fantasy art? You'll find Martin's tradition still going strong down the road from the Laing at Grainger Market, where the 'Mystique Illusions in Wood' stall does a nice line in laminated fantasy-art posters or, for the more old-fashioned customer, a 'Loui's [sic] Fire Surround' that'd look just lovely under a watercolour landscape.
Also showing until 11 July are the National Gallery Touring Exhibition Making Faces; a new video work, The Underworld, by Mark Malinger; and a solo show of photographs by Ann Hardy.
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