DeWint discoveries: despite the high reputation that Peter DeWint's watercolours have always enjoyed, there has been oddly little curiosity about what they represent. Timothy Wilcox presents new discoveries that reveal how essential topographical accuracy was to him

Apollo, April, 2008 by Timothy Wilcox

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One of the intriguing suggestions to emerge from Tate's magisterial 2006 exhibition 'Constable: the Great Landscapes' was that the artist may have given his paintings generalised, non-descriptive titles because of the Royal Academy's prejudice against topography. (1) In the annual exhibitions, landscape painting per se was stigmatised with a lack of ambition, an inability to excite the imagination or the emotions; art's highest calling was thought to be best conveyed through historical or literary subjects. Views that purported to depict specific locations were too easily dismissed, in Fuseli's memorable put-down, as the 'tame delineation of a given spot'. (2) Yet outside London, a greater love of realism prevailed. In 1811, J. S. Cotman's friend and patron Francis Cholmeley conveyed to the artist the comments of a bookseller in York on his latest etchings: 'He said his subscribers did not like the view in Duncombe Park, because it might have been anywhere. Two-thirds of mankind, you know, mind more what is represented than how it is done.' (3)

Peter DeWint, born in 1784, was two years younger than Cotman and eight years Constable's junior. His art, almost exclusively landscape, occupied very much the same ground as theirs, but, arguably, with a greater range than either, embracing large compositions or fantasy landscapes in oil at one end of the scale and innumerable depictions of historic cathedrals, castles and abbeys at the other. By the end of his life, in 1849, he was customarily referred to as one of the great triumvirate of landscape watercolourists who had formed the backbone of the Society of Painters in Water Colours as long as anyone could remember: David Cox, Copley Fielding and DeWint himself. Even though Ruskin could write of DeWint in 1846 that 'I fear that these works testify more accuracy of eye and experience of colour than exercise of thought' (using Turner as the yardstick compared with which all living painters fell short), other critics were more appreciative. (4) In 1849, the last year he exhibited, the Examiner found his contributions 'masterpieces in his manly and unaffected style. They are as full of beauty, as sober yet harmonious in colour, as unobtrusively true in every part, as anything visible in nature.' (5)

DeWint has never ceased to be admired. Martin Hardie, writing as an accomplished painter himself, spoke for several generations of watercolourists in his appreciation: 'No other painter has ever put on paper with more effect that touch of fine colour from a full-flowing brush, which, as it dries out, transparent and rich in bloom, is the essence of the art of watercolour'. (6) Yet while DeWint's technique, particularly in his sketches, continues to impress, the subjects he chose to paint with such seeming effortlessness remain, by and large, mute. The tendency to concentrate on the look of the works rather than think about their content was current in the artist's lifetime; as the contemporary critics already quoted demonstrate, this was a stance shared by both DeWint's detractors and his supporters. This attitude has reached its sadly predictable conclusion: the original titles of the works are now frequently lost or forgotten. The collector and critic Randall Davies, writing about DeWint in the first volume of a publication which reflects the great growth in scholarship in English watercolour painting between the wars, the annual volume of the 'Old' Watercolour Society's Club, made a virtue of this: 'it is not from carelessness, nor from accident, that so many of his sketches are of unnamed places. It is because they are not "views" of a place, but landscape studies, in which the name of the place is only of secondary importance'. (7) The most assiduous of recent DeWint scholars, Hammond Smith, quoting this remark, observes that although 'the spirit of this statement is not in dispute, it is factually untrue', given the great number of place names cited in the rifles of the artist's exhibited works.

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For any student of DeWint, the paintings form by far the most significant primary resource. There is little correspondence to give a contrasting, more personal perspective. Even the artist's sketchbooks, of which nearly 20 are preserved in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, shed scant light on his art, although some contain useful lists of pupils and patrons. Where, for most landscape artists, the sketchbook functioned as a kind of visual diary, with frequent annotations of place and date, in DeWint's such inscriptions are conspicuous by their absence. Either he had a prodigious memory, or else he was primarily concerned to recall only the visual aspects of the scene he had drawn; perhaps both.

The literature on the artist is not extensive, considering the size of his reputation. The memoir by his widow is concerned to give the impression of an uneventful life, dominated by painting, and later writers have had only moderate success in reforming this mould. (8) Walter Armstrong's Memoir of Peter DeWint, published in 1888, was less uniformly sympathetic, but did not encourage further enquiry; Paul Oppe, writing in 1924 considered 'nothing of consequence' on the artist had appeared between that time and his own. (9) Hammond Smith followed up his 1982 volume with an exhibition marking the artist's bicentenary in 1984. The inclusion of DeWint's forebears and pupils made this the best opportunity in recent memory to gain a rounded understanding of his work, which last year's exhibition at the Usher Gallery did little to dispel. (10)