Ingenium?: An investigation
of shifting creative values from the perspectives of subjectivity and culture
in the works of Eugene von Guérard.
Fine art is the art of genius.
Genius
is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as
an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to nature, we may
put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which
nature gives the rule to art (Kant).
‘Milford
Sound with Pembroke Peak and Bowen Falls on the west coast of Middle Island,
New Zealand’, by German artist Eugene von Guérard, is a typical example of the Romantic
tradition of the sublime in nature. An investigation of the artist, his works
and ideas from the point of view of Romantic concepts associated with
creativity reveals a highly driven, exceptionally skilled, and passionate individual
– a genius in his ability to combine a “breadth of feeling and painstaking
attention to detail” in his depiction of the remote and formidable landscapes
of New Zealand and Australia, landscapes which had never before been captured in
paint.
‘Milford Sound’ successfully combines sophisticated scientific investigations with the ‘poetry of divine power’. In his drive to depict beauty and meaning in the highest form, the artist has presented us with an awe-inspiring landscape, his treatment of subject matter being an embodiment of the feeling of a poet and the touch of a master. The work is evidence of the artist’s brilliant understanding of symmetry and form, with his depiction of the echo of reflections on the glass-like water, and the perfect precision of the minutely rendered pebbles in the foreground. However, an overwhelming sense of awe is also achieved via the depiction of the great magnitude of the mountainous landscape. The 5 tiny figures and boat in the middle-ground provide a point of comparison, and the sense of scale and grandeur forces the viewer to really understand, and therefore to experience, the power and magnitude of nature.
Von Guérard’s work has a distinctly Humboltian
aesthetic. The lengthy volumes of Alexander Von Humboldt’s Cosmos, published in 1849, presented a visionary science in which
the patient study of the natural world was linked with a semi-religious
philosophy of unity and wonder. It saw a connection between the overwhelming
sensation of the sublime and a scientific project such as drawing the minutiae
of rocks and foliage. It was about a poetic science - the materials of science
were given a religious structure. Von Guérard’s work is a perfect embodiment of
the 19th Century Romantic philosophy of emotion informed by intellect.
"In Australia alone is to be found
the grotesque, the weird, the strange
scribblings of
nature learning how to write. Some see
no beauty in
our trees without shade, our flowers
without perfume,
our birds who cannot fly. But the
dweller in the
wilderness acknowledges the subtle
charm of this
fantastic land of monstrosities. He
becomes familiar
with the beauty of loneliness,
whispered to by the
myriad tongues of the wilderness he
learns the
language of the barren and the
uncouth."
Marcus Clarke
In ‘North-east view from the northern
top of Mount Kosciusko’, von Guérard encounters the vast Australian landscape
first hand, capturing dramatically wild scenery encountered on expeditions, far
remote from colonial occupation. Again, we see the minute forms of the artist
or explorer, the scientist and the rest of the expedition team set against a
vast and otherwise unpeopled vista. There is a combination of meticulous
attention to detail and artistic licence with the framework of imagined rock
formations in the foreground. This is a grand view, and quintessentially sublime
in its depiction of awe in nature. The work also has an autobiographical
element. The inscription on the painting reveals that the work is a record of
November 19, 1862, the artist’s 51st birthday. On this day the artist truly put
himself in jeopardy for his art, and as he immersed himself in recording the
topography of the site a heavy storm approached from the NSW side. The situation
was particularly bad as the team did not have all their equipment with them and
so had to return to their camp, 11km away. This was a disastrous and dangerous
journey. For von Guérard the remote landscape was not just an awe-inspiring
scene but a profoundly frightening place.
Mount Kosciusko has been described as one
of von Guerard's most inventive paintings. He not only created a remarkable
link between foreground and sky but also added profoundly to the sublimity and
grandeur of his subject. von Guérard successfully depicted the sublime in the
Australian landscape by capturing the remote setting as a sense of something
ancient, vast and strange. He defined the difficulty of imaginatively
inhabiting Australia; however, by using the genre of the sublime landscape, von
Guérard was able to make his discovery intelligible for the viewer, shifting
the viewer’s discomfort into an aesthetic experience.
The artist, as genius, cleverly uses a mode of expression which allows the
viewer to not only understand the work conceptually, but also to experience a
similar state of mind that the artist had when creating the work.
Cultural perspective
An assessment of the relations between
the artist, the field of practice, and the attitudes of the audience, including
the taste of the time, however, reveals an entirely different view of the
creative performance of the artist.
While von Guérard enjoyed much acclaim
during his career, by the time he had painted ‘North-east view’ he had started to fall out of favour. There were three
major oil paintings which resulted from the Kosciusko trip however, only Mount Kosciusko seen from the Victorian
Border (1866) and Valley of the Mitta
Mitta with the Bogong Ranges (1866) were acquired by the National Gallery
of Victoria. ‘North-east view’ was
shown in April 1863 in Wilkie and Webster's music shop, one of Melbourne's
regular showplaces for paintings, and then at an exhibition of art and science
in Ballarat in August. While he had high hopes that the painting would be of great Australian national
interest, the response by local critics was mostly
negative, and it is said that this period spelled a sharp decline in the
artist’s reputation. The work was, essentially, not viewed to be creative by
many due to the changing tastes of the time.
In 1870, James
Smith, a leading Melbourne taste-maker who had previously positioned the artist
as Victoria’s leading landscape painter right throughout the 1850s and 60’s,
wrote that von
Guérard’s work “offers a minutely
laborious description of almost every leaf upon the gum trees, and of every
crevice in the rocks, which would make them delightful illustrations of a
treatise on the botanical or geological features of the colony”. This was not a
complement. The critic saw the artist’s attention to detail as being
incompatible with greatness. The artist in response, however,
argued that in their attention to detail “his paintings would have greater
value, where it will be doubtful that those which can be taken equally well for
a misty English or an Australian landscape will have the same future”. He also
argued that while his works were an “elaborate copy of [Nature’s] details”, he
was able to catch a glimpse of “divine poetical feelings”.
North-east
view remained unsold. Von Guérard showed it again at
Melbourne's Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866 and while the jurors singled out von
Guérard’s painting for comment, declaring it "most remarkable" as
"an accurate topographic portrait", this assessment was inherently
dismissive because topographic recording did not rank as art. The press was
much more hostile. The Argus considered the painting to be the least
satisfactory of von Guérard’s paintings in the exhibition. ‘Rocks, rocks, rocks
on every side’ decried the exasperated Smith,
and ‘most uncomfortable to look at’, despite being ‘terribly true to nature’.
The Australasian characterised it as "dreariness itself".
Smith’s
tiring of von Guérard’s works reflected the change in taste in art that was not
confined to Australia. von Guérard fell out of favour while other painters such
as Chevalier and Buvelot received much greater acclaim and had their reputations
reinforced with the purchase of their works for the National Gallery of
Victoria. Buvelot became a highly influential artist
and was admired by the artists of the Heidelberg school who named him the
“father of Australian painting”. Christopher Allen states that “Buvelot thus
turned Australian painting from its concern with the strangeness of nature –
whether beautiful or terrifying or both – to the spectacle of its
domestication. Of course, we are seeing the emergence of Australian
Impressionism where the freer and less meticulous execution of plein air painting was preferred to the
high finish of von Guérard’s intensely sublime landscapes.
Von Guerard's
reputation remained the same for most of the 20th century. The original edition
of McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968) allocated the artist only 13
lines and described him as an "academic painter of landscape and mountain
scenery". Robert Hughes's dismissed the artist’s works as being "indigestibly
stodgy prospects of mountains and lakes".
Today
(still cultural orientation):
In 1973 the
Surrealist painter James Gleeson was visiting Mexico City to organise a
cultural exchange for the National Gallery of Australia. While he was there the
Australian ambassador told him of a painting by von Guérard in a local
collection. When he saw it he immediately told the NGA’s director to buy it. In
the 1980s we see a revival of the work of von Guérard, including North-east
view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko. The NGA chose the work as the
cover picture of the first von Guérard retrospective (Candice Bruce's survey
that toured around Australia in 1980-81), and pre-Heidelberg painting was
studied on its own terms by Tim Bonyhady in Images in Opposition (1985).
Today, the appreciation of North-east view is
entirely different. It is considered a work which embodies a masterful approach
depicting the landscape in a highly skilled, yet artistic manner. When
discussing von Guérard today’s critics and historians (John McDonald,
Christopher Allen, Edmund Capon) all make comparisons to works of the artist’s
contemporaries, and his contemporaries always fall short. Christopher Allen
argues that von Guérard was the first colonial artist to move far enough away
from settled areas to really engage with the deeper experience of settlement,
and to therefore truly encounter the alien Australian landscape. Here, the
artist differs to Conrad Martens who, whilst embracing the Romantic idea of the
picturesque by capturing
the atmospheric effects of light and weather in nature using a style which was
“increasingly Turneresque”, was never really far away enough from ploughed
farms, fenced gardens and Georgian mansions to truly experience landscape on a
deep level.
Allen also discusses comparisons made
between von Guérard and nineteenth-century American painters of the sublime
landscape. He states that these comparisons are misleading as they ignore
historical contexts. Von Guérard was part of a “crucially formative period of
Australian culture”, whereas the nineteenth-century American painters were
working long after a definition of what it is to be American was established.
The Americans were viewing the romantic wilderness within the context of an
established culture, therefore the works did not have the same down-to-earth
attention to detail and von Guérard’s humility and integrity saved him from the
perils of kitsch”.
Many critics (Allen, McDonald, Capon) today
are now keen to refer to, and debunk, the cliché that is the view that European
artists with their European aesthetic applied their European sensibilities to
their depictions of Australian landscape. Allen, for example, states that “particularly pernicious was the lazy cliché
-- still to be encountered in student essays and overheard in galleries -- that
Streeton and Roberts were the first to see the Australian environment properly,
while the colonial painters thoughtlessly rehearsed formulas they had brought
with them from Europe”.
Critics today once again refer to the
artist’s ingenuity in presenting a dramatic yet highly accurate view of the
landscape which ‘moves’ its audiences. Sayers (201), argues that von Guérard “was
undoubtedly the best landscape painter in Australia of this time and much of
the success of his work relied on a combination of the meticulously observed
with the grandiose”. Allen (2011) states that “no artist has ever looked so
carefully, and with more exacting standards of accuracy, at the Australian
environment”, and that “we recognise him today as a figure who towers above so
many more ephemeral successors”. Today the artist is once again considered a
genius in the Kantian sense, that is, as having innate mental aptitude or ingenium, and is also considered an
artist of great Australian national interest.
