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拍品專文
Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913, the picture represents one of the most beautiful valleys in the Bernese Oberland, situated twelve miles from Interlaken and dominated by the two great peaks of the Wetterhorn and the Eiger. Many viewers would have recognised the subject as Grindelwald was already a popular centre for winter sports.
Waterlow was sixty-three at the time and nearing the end of a long and successful career. He had devoted himself exclusively to landscape, bringing to it an accessible academic style and a keen eye for a picturesque subject. The Waterlow family was of Walloon descent, and the Dutch landscape painter Anthonie Waterloo (1610-1690) was reputedly an ancestor. Ernest was born in London on 24 May 1850, the only son of A.C. Waterlow, lithographer. One of his uncles was Sir Sydney Hedley Waterlow (1822-1906), a wealthy, self-made printer who entered Parliament and was Lord Mayor of London 1872-73. A generous philanthropist, Sydney is still commemorated by Waterlow Park, Highgate, the thirty-acre open space that he presented to the people of London in 1889.
When Ernest's father died young, the boy was taken by his mother to Heidelberg, where his formal education, begun in England, was completed. He also began to study art under François-Louis Bocion (1828-1890), an ex-pupil of Charles Gleyre in Paris who was now head of an art school at Lausanne. In the autumn of 1867, by now seventeen, Waterlow returned to London to pursue his studies at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, run by Francis Stephen Cary. A son of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, F.S. Cary had attended the school under its founder, Henry Sass, taking it over from his master in 1842. Like the rival establishment run by J.M. Leigh in nearby Newman Street, Cary's tended to prepare pupils for the Royal Academy Schools, from which many of them went on to achieve fame.
Waterlow was typical. In 1872, two years before Cary retired from teaching, he graduated to Burlington House, where the RA had been established since 1869. Landscape was already his forte, and the following year he won the Turner Gold Medal for his prowess in this field. In 1872 he also made his debut at the Academy's summer exhibition. With one exception, he was to be represented there every year until his death in 1919, contributing over 150 works in all. Galway Gossips, a picture shown in 1887, was bought for the Chantrey Bequest. In 1890 the RA elected him an associate, and in 1903 a full member.
Despite his loyalty to the Academy, Waterlow was not averse to exhibiting elsewhere. He supported a succession of liberal alternatives, the Dudley, Grosvenor and New Galleries. He was a member of the Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Watercolour Society, succeeding the veteran Sir John Gilbert as President of the latter in 1897 and holding the post for seventeen years. He even exhibited abroad, picking up a gold medal at the Berlin Academy in 1896 and a silver medal at the International Exhibition held in Paris in 1900. The climax of his career came in 1902, when he was knighted by Edward VII. Painters of subject pictures and portraits had long been accorded this honour, but Waterlow was the first landscapist to receive it. Even Sir Augustus Wall Calcott, the so-called 'English Claude', had been knighted not for his landscapes but for his long service as Keeper of the Royal Collection.
Waterlow himself acknowledged a debt to George Hemming Mason (1818-1872) and Fred Walker (1840-1875), two artists who died when he was in his twenties and had much to teach him about the poetic possibilities of landscape. For many years he actually occupied Walker's former studio in Bayswater, and the posthumous sale of his collection at Christie's shows that he owned a work by Mason. A later but complementary influence was that of Corot and the Barbizon school, whose haunts he visited and painted in the mid-1890s.
Where Waterlow differed from the Barbizon artists was in his readiness to seek his subjects widely rather than exhaustively exploring a single area. He was constantly on the move in England, travelling the length and breadth of the country from Cornwall to Northumberland via the home counties and East Anglia. Subjects were also found in Scotland and Ireland, or on sketching tours abroad to Bavaria, Picardy and the Côte d'Azur.
During the last years of his life, however, it was Switzerland that came to dominate Waterlow's imagination. The present two pictures were among at least eleven Swiss subjects that he exhibited at the RA between 1913 and 1919; there may well have been more since it is quite possible that works with such titles as The Silent Woods (1914), The Mantle of Winter and The Forest Track (both 1916) also depicted Alpine scenes. Even if they did not, the obsession with forest and winter subjects that they represent clearly sprang from the same impulse as our pictures and a host of others portraying specific features of the Bernese Oberland: The Schilterhorn in Winter from Wengen, The Upper Aletsch Glacier from the Jungfraujoch (both 1913), The Mönch and Eiger from Mürren (1914), On the Wengern Alp: Winter (1915), The Jungfrau (1917), The Wetterhorn (1919), and so on.
The appeal of these subjects for Waterlow almost certainly stemmed from the months he had spent as a young man at Lausanne. As Edgcumbe Staley wrote in an article in the Art Journal (1903, p. 52), 'the magnificence of the scenery of the Lake of Geneva and the splendid effects of sun and shade inspired him with the desire to be a painter. He never tired of making sketches of the lake-shores and the mountains.' No doubt his master, F.-L. Bocion, encouraged his enthusiasm. Bocion's own artistic speciality was landscape, and one of his favourite themes was the Italian Lakes. Whatever the case, there is no evidence to support the theory, sometimes advanced, that Waterlow went to Switzerland as a young man in response to Ruskin's rapturous descriptions of Alpine scenery in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856).
Waterlow's early travels brought him more than artistic inspiration. In 1876 he married Mary Margaret Sophia, the daughter of Professor Carl Hofmann of Heidelberg University, whose family he had almost certainly met as a boy. This, together with a record of his travelling again in Germany and Switzerland in 1870, suggests that he identified closely with the area he had discovered as a youth, making it something of a second home. But if this was the case, why did he only exibit Alpine subjects in the last years of his life?
Many artists return in old age to early sources of inspiration, and to some extent Waterlow may have been conforming to this familiar pattern. Certainly it could account for the four Swiss subjects, including the present picture, that he exhibited at the RA in 1913.
But with the outbreak of the Great War the following year, his Swiss scenes seemed to acquire a more positive focus, offering a vehicle for his response to the tragic events unfolding across the Channel. For years his pastoral and idyllic themes had chimed with late Victorian and Edwardian security and optimism. Suddenly something very different was called for, images sufficiently bleak and threatening not to seem irrelevant in the light of the current catastrophe, yet so transcendent that they held out hope of eventual peace and renewal.
That the war preoccupied Waterlow we know from the titles of two pictures that he exhibited shortly before his death: Autumn: Valley of the Somme (1918) and A Country Road, Valley of the Somme (1919). He had two sons, who were probably now in their thirties and could well have been involved in the hostilities. If so, we know they survived, but even the fact that they existed must have intensified their father's awareness of how the war was decimating the nation's youth.
Waterlow of course was one of many artists who felt compelled to comment on the war in their painting, whether like him, they were Victorians who had lived on into a very different age, or belonged to a younger generation that brought to the task a Post-Impressionist aesthetic. Symbolism was still a popular option, even if it no longer took the jingoistic turn that had characterised it in pictures inspired by the Boer War some fifteen years earlier. On 29 April 1916 the Times ran an article on the subject. Entitled 'War in Art: Subject Pictures at the Academy: Realism and Imagination', it discussed such works as George Clausen's Youth Mourning and Charles Sims's Clio and the Children, both exhibited that year. Waterlow's Swiss subjects were not mentioned, no doubt being too subtle an example to be included in such a cursory review, but a more comprehensive analysis might well have found a place for these fascinating attempts to reinvent academic landscape as apocalyptic vision.
Waterlow was sixty-three at the time and nearing the end of a long and successful career. He had devoted himself exclusively to landscape, bringing to it an accessible academic style and a keen eye for a picturesque subject. The Waterlow family was of Walloon descent, and the Dutch landscape painter Anthonie Waterloo (1610-1690) was reputedly an ancestor. Ernest was born in London on 24 May 1850, the only son of A.C. Waterlow, lithographer. One of his uncles was Sir Sydney Hedley Waterlow (1822-1906), a wealthy, self-made printer who entered Parliament and was Lord Mayor of London 1872-73. A generous philanthropist, Sydney is still commemorated by Waterlow Park, Highgate, the thirty-acre open space that he presented to the people of London in 1889.
When Ernest's father died young, the boy was taken by his mother to Heidelberg, where his formal education, begun in England, was completed. He also began to study art under François-Louis Bocion (1828-1890), an ex-pupil of Charles Gleyre in Paris who was now head of an art school at Lausanne. In the autumn of 1867, by now seventeen, Waterlow returned to London to pursue his studies at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, run by Francis Stephen Cary. A son of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, F.S. Cary had attended the school under its founder, Henry Sass, taking it over from his master in 1842. Like the rival establishment run by J.M. Leigh in nearby Newman Street, Cary's tended to prepare pupils for the Royal Academy Schools, from which many of them went on to achieve fame.
Waterlow was typical. In 1872, two years before Cary retired from teaching, he graduated to Burlington House, where the RA had been established since 1869. Landscape was already his forte, and the following year he won the Turner Gold Medal for his prowess in this field. In 1872 he also made his debut at the Academy's summer exhibition. With one exception, he was to be represented there every year until his death in 1919, contributing over 150 works in all. Galway Gossips, a picture shown in 1887, was bought for the Chantrey Bequest. In 1890 the RA elected him an associate, and in 1903 a full member.
Despite his loyalty to the Academy, Waterlow was not averse to exhibiting elsewhere. He supported a succession of liberal alternatives, the Dudley, Grosvenor and New Galleries. He was a member of the Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Watercolour Society, succeeding the veteran Sir John Gilbert as President of the latter in 1897 and holding the post for seventeen years. He even exhibited abroad, picking up a gold medal at the Berlin Academy in 1896 and a silver medal at the International Exhibition held in Paris in 1900. The climax of his career came in 1902, when he was knighted by Edward VII. Painters of subject pictures and portraits had long been accorded this honour, but Waterlow was the first landscapist to receive it. Even Sir Augustus Wall Calcott, the so-called 'English Claude', had been knighted not for his landscapes but for his long service as Keeper of the Royal Collection.
Waterlow himself acknowledged a debt to George Hemming Mason (1818-1872) and Fred Walker (1840-1875), two artists who died when he was in his twenties and had much to teach him about the poetic possibilities of landscape. For many years he actually occupied Walker's former studio in Bayswater, and the posthumous sale of his collection at Christie's shows that he owned a work by Mason. A later but complementary influence was that of Corot and the Barbizon school, whose haunts he visited and painted in the mid-1890s.
Where Waterlow differed from the Barbizon artists was in his readiness to seek his subjects widely rather than exhaustively exploring a single area. He was constantly on the move in England, travelling the length and breadth of the country from Cornwall to Northumberland via the home counties and East Anglia. Subjects were also found in Scotland and Ireland, or on sketching tours abroad to Bavaria, Picardy and the Côte d'Azur.
During the last years of his life, however, it was Switzerland that came to dominate Waterlow's imagination. The present two pictures were among at least eleven Swiss subjects that he exhibited at the RA between 1913 and 1919; there may well have been more since it is quite possible that works with such titles as The Silent Woods (1914), The Mantle of Winter and The Forest Track (both 1916) also depicted Alpine scenes. Even if they did not, the obsession with forest and winter subjects that they represent clearly sprang from the same impulse as our pictures and a host of others portraying specific features of the Bernese Oberland: The Schilterhorn in Winter from Wengen, The Upper Aletsch Glacier from the Jungfraujoch (both 1913), The Mönch and Eiger from Mürren (1914), On the Wengern Alp: Winter (1915), The Jungfrau (1917), The Wetterhorn (1919), and so on.
The appeal of these subjects for Waterlow almost certainly stemmed from the months he had spent as a young man at Lausanne. As Edgcumbe Staley wrote in an article in the Art Journal (1903, p. 52), 'the magnificence of the scenery of the Lake of Geneva and the splendid effects of sun and shade inspired him with the desire to be a painter. He never tired of making sketches of the lake-shores and the mountains.' No doubt his master, F.-L. Bocion, encouraged his enthusiasm. Bocion's own artistic speciality was landscape, and one of his favourite themes was the Italian Lakes. Whatever the case, there is no evidence to support the theory, sometimes advanced, that Waterlow went to Switzerland as a young man in response to Ruskin's rapturous descriptions of Alpine scenery in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856).
Waterlow's early travels brought him more than artistic inspiration. In 1876 he married Mary Margaret Sophia, the daughter of Professor Carl Hofmann of Heidelberg University, whose family he had almost certainly met as a boy. This, together with a record of his travelling again in Germany and Switzerland in 1870, suggests that he identified closely with the area he had discovered as a youth, making it something of a second home. But if this was the case, why did he only exibit Alpine subjects in the last years of his life?
Many artists return in old age to early sources of inspiration, and to some extent Waterlow may have been conforming to this familiar pattern. Certainly it could account for the four Swiss subjects, including the present picture, that he exhibited at the RA in 1913.
But with the outbreak of the Great War the following year, his Swiss scenes seemed to acquire a more positive focus, offering a vehicle for his response to the tragic events unfolding across the Channel. For years his pastoral and idyllic themes had chimed with late Victorian and Edwardian security and optimism. Suddenly something very different was called for, images sufficiently bleak and threatening not to seem irrelevant in the light of the current catastrophe, yet so transcendent that they held out hope of eventual peace and renewal.
That the war preoccupied Waterlow we know from the titles of two pictures that he exhibited shortly before his death: Autumn: Valley of the Somme (1918) and A Country Road, Valley of the Somme (1919). He had two sons, who were probably now in their thirties and could well have been involved in the hostilities. If so, we know they survived, but even the fact that they existed must have intensified their father's awareness of how the war was decimating the nation's youth.
Waterlow of course was one of many artists who felt compelled to comment on the war in their painting, whether like him, they were Victorians who had lived on into a very different age, or belonged to a younger generation that brought to the task a Post-Impressionist aesthetic. Symbolism was still a popular option, even if it no longer took the jingoistic turn that had characterised it in pictures inspired by the Boer War some fifteen years earlier. On 29 April 1916 the Times ran an article on the subject. Entitled 'War in Art: Subject Pictures at the Academy: Realism and Imagination', it discussed such works as George Clausen's Youth Mourning and Charles Sims's Clio and the Children, both exhibited that year. Waterlow's Swiss subjects were not mentioned, no doubt being too subtle an example to be included in such a cursory review, but a more comprehensive analysis might well have found a place for these fascinating attempts to reinvent academic landscape as apocalyptic vision.