Tongland | Old Shoe Box

Perhaps not the most exciting exhibition – over 200 years of landscape painting in the north of England and Scotland – but it gave me the chance to see more of the Fleming Collection (which I’d been introduced to at Abbot Hall). It begins with romantic landscapes – just oozing “sublime” – and then moves to less dramatic scenes. “Real” people begin to appear; there is an awareness of the changes in the landscape as the north industrialises or forces/draws people away from the land.

My steal was Ferguson’s “Winter Sunshine, Moniaive” – so simple and so lovely (Moniaive again) – and there was plenty in the exhibition to keep me thinking and comparing.

The Bruegel engraving – that may be the Bass Rock in the background, and there is Icarus falling again. North Berwick meets Brussels in my memory.
Apparently Jacob More used a “Claude glass” to “reduce and simplify the colour and tonal range to give a painterly quality”. Named after Claude Lorrain, it was a small tinted mirror; the painter turned his back on the scene and viewed the reflection.
Robert Jopling and the north-east coast: great reflections in the wet sand – and as soon as I left the exhibition and moved into the main galleries, there was that same view and those same reflections again.
The building of the Tongland dam!
I liked the patchwork quality in Guthrie’s painting – apparently he used a square brush.
Joan Eardley has an alchemical gift with paint. It’s just splodges on canvas with drips where it’s been rained on or splashed by the salt spray – and somehow you really experience the sea.
The pit painting was by an unknown artist, but I thought it was so particular and strange that it could have been painted a surrealist such as Tristram Hillier. Or perhaps Douanier Rousseau might have been pleased with it.

I started with Broughton House, the home of E A Hornel from 1901 until his death. I still don’t care for his work, but it was an interesting visit for the insight it gave into how an artist works. Hornel often used photographs, paying local girls to adopt certain poses which he then copied in his paintings. (A momentary eyebrow-raising here, but they were chaperoned.) The same face cropped up again and again – a local woman not unlike the eastern women who featured so much in Hornel’s work after his first visit to Japan. For all their colour, there was a certain monotony about the paintings on display: the same blobs of background, the same emphasis on face, the same girls. However even a successful artist has a living to earn:

The man who works because he is in the mood may expect failure. I work always. One who enthuses over his work will always find something to do. The real mood or inspiration comes oftener through work than by waiting. Everyone recognises the great importance of inspiration; but the talk of waiting for it is unfortunately so often the excuse for idleness.

As usual, lesser thoughts would intrude. How dirty the photographed girls’ fingernails and bare feet were. (Well, doh . . . obviously!) Did the gas for the early gas mantels come from the gasworks that Lord Peter Wimsey passes in Five Red Herrings? The collection of samplers . . . how did the religious homilies work on the minds of the little girls who made them? Having casts of the Parthenon friezes in your gallery – no false modesty there!

Hornel’s long garden, leading down to the estuary, was, of course, lovely.

After that I walked over the bridge (currently closed; was it the one that Wimsey drove over to Gatehouse of Fleet?) to get a view of Kirkcudbright from the other side. My plan of following a path marked on the map was abandoned after the second deliberate blockage (how does one go walking in Scotland?). I headed grumpily back to town and walked upstream towards Tongland, muttering darkly about being corralled on pavements and boring paths. However it grew on me with the spring freshness of horse chestnut leaves and the glittering sun. (The weather has been glorious.) And then at Tongland I discovered the truncated bridge of a disused railway line, a modernist power station and the earthworks of an ancient fort. How much more could I wish for?