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Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) artmuseum.princeton.edu Exhibitions: Princeton and the Gothic Revival 1870–1930
This insightful exploration of the revolutionary working processes of John Constable (1776–1837), one of England’s most beloved painters, is the most ambitious look at the artist’s work to be held in the United States in a generation. Taking his paint box into the countryside, Constable was one of the first artists to work en plein air, “so as to note ‘the day, the hour, the sunshine and the shade.’” Working directly from nature in the now-canonical “Constable Country” of Suffolk and Essex, he created brilliant, seemingly spontaneous canvases that came to epitomize the ideal English landscape in the nineteenth century. The second son of a landowning miller and corn merchant in the village of East Bergholt, Suffolk, Constable was expected to succeed his father in the family business. Yet, while he loved the quiet countryside of his youth, Constable showed little agricultural aptitude and developed instead an interest in landscape painting. In 1798, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the recently established Royal Academy Schools in London. As a student, Constable rejected the traditional hierarchy of genres that ranked idealized historical and mythological landscapes above natural scenes and aspired to paint canvases that were “a pure and unaffected representation [of nature].” Beginning in 1802, Constable returned to his family home during the spring and summer months to draw and paint in the open air, producing studies of the local fields and farms that he incorporated into finished landscape paintings in his London studio, including Dedham Vale from the Coombs (1802). Constable turned to the medium of the oil sketch for his landscape studies in an effort to replicate the effervescent effects of light and color he experienced painting outdoors. Working rapidly on sheets of paper or scraps of old canvas pinned to the lid of a paint box held on his knees, Constable deftly recorded the fields, woods, and skies of favorite locations in the lush Suffolk countryside. With increasing confidence, he soon developed a strikingly fresh painting style in his oil sketches that captured the shimmering surfaces and shifting light of his surroundings. Beginning in the summer of 1817, due to his wife’s delicate health, Constable rented a cottage in Hampstead, then a rural village four miles northwest of London, settling there with his family permanently in 1827. Hampstead Heath was situated on a hill high above the smoke of what was then, at the height of the British Empire, the world’s most industrialized city. The natural beauty of the heath and the panoramic views provided Constable with ample opportunity to make detailed observations of clouds and atmospheric effects in lively oil sketches that are today some of the artist’s most original contributions to the history of art. Although Hampstead would remain the artist’s home, in the following years Constable also traveled to the plains of Salisbury and the Brighton shore, producing distinctive oil sketches and important exhibition paintings that further immortalized English landscape scenery. John Constable belonged to an age of profound political and scientific change. In the second half of the eighteenth century scientists and naturalists of the British Enlightenment began to redefine the natural world by closely observing and cataloguing nature as they saw it, drawing scientific conclusions based on deductive reasoning rather than accepted academic theory or the teachings of the church. The Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797), the English naturalist and ornithologist Gilbert White (1720–1793), and the London-born meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864) all proposed groundbreaking scientific theories stressing that the natural world exists in a continual state of evolution. Constable was well aware of the importance of these scientific developments and declared that “painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why then, may not landscape be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?” As a result, he inscribed his oil sketches with the location, date, and specific weather conditions in which they were made. Ironically, the artist’s subsequent fame was based on his full-sized studio paintings, and his fluid, rapidly painted plein-air sketches were seldom exhibited in his lifetime. Eighteenth-century artists also used oil sketch techniques to develop overall composition studies for complex painting projects. Likewise, Constable made elaborate full-scale oil studies for some of his exhibition paintings, including The Hay Wain in 1821 and The Leaping Horse in 1825. Although the artist never left England, his reputation blossomed quickly abroad—particularly in France, where his final version of The Hay Wain, now in the National Gallery, London, sensationalized Parisian audiences at the 1824 Salon, winning a gold medal and the praise of such luminaries as Stendhal (1783–1842) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Constable’s revolutionary working process and fluid painting techniques encouraged a younger generation of French painters to work en plein air. While the aesthetic and political aims differed greatly from those of Constable, these artists all profited from Constable’s example of working out of doors. Troyon’s support of the amateur marine painter Eugène Boudin (1824–1898)—who in turn encouraged the young Claude Monet to paint directly from nature—carried Constable’s legacy into the 1870s and thereby helped to profoundly change the course of modern art. Calvin Brown
Princeton and the Gothic Revival: 1870–1930 investigates Americans’ changing attitudes to the art, architecture, and style of the Middle Ages through the lens of Princeton University around the turn of the twentieth century. The exhibition considers how and why an architectural mode that was first used in the United States for picturesque mansions of the wealthy evolved into a style that was understood as particularly appropriate for universities. Drawing from the singular resources of Princeton’s Firestone Library and University Archives, along with the collections of the Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other institutions, Princeton and the Gothic Revival explores the central role Princeton played in the Gothic Revival movement and the uses of architecture to define a great modern university. The exhibition introduces the American interpretation of the Gothic Revival, which began in England in the mid-eighteenth century but did not become popular in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. “Gothic” at that time often meant a picturesque form of architecture and decorative arts, epitomized by the designs of the preeminent Gothic Revival architect A. J. Davis. Davis’s design for Glen Ellen, generally acknowledged as the first Gothic Revival mansion in the United States, exhibits this picturesque approach, with its crenellated roofline, tower, and large bay window. The exhibition shifts to the campus of what was then the College of New Jersey, beginning with an eclectic approach to the art and style of the Middle Ages during the 1870s and 1880s. This era saw the construction of a number of lavish High Victorian Gothic buildings financed by wealthy patrons—including industrialist and banker Henry G. Marquand, who donated funds to build a new chapel, named in his honor, which formerly stood on the site of what is now McCosh quadrangle. Marquand Chapel, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt, featured decorations by some of the most sought-after artists of the day, including Louis Comfort Tiffany, John La Farge, Augustus Saint- Gaudens, Frederic Crowninshield, and Francis Lathrop. The building incorporated Gothic forms with other architectural styles to replicate on the University’s campus the “Aesthetic” approach popular in domestic interiors of the period. The second half of the exhibition investigates the use of medieval revival buildings to communicate the values of a new American model of higher education. This model was in part influenced by the trend toward scientific study, an approach championed by University President James McCosh. New fields devoted to object-based study, including biology and art history, were added to the curriculum. Both were housed in rather sober (and inexpensively constructed) Romanesque Revival buildings. The focus on education, not luxuries, was echoed in the collections of the new Museum of Historic Art, which included pottery, plaster casts, medieval ivories, and small-scale sculptures. Although most of these objects were not considered masterpieces, they provided the faculty and students with opportunities to engage in close looking at authentic works of art at a price the new museum could afford. The school was rechristened Princeton University as part of the celebration surrounding its 150th anniversary in 1896. Flush with money from donors to the sesquicentennial campaign and eager to build a campus that would reflect the University’s status on the world stage, the administration decreed that all new buildings would be designed in the Collegiate Gothic Revival style. This style refers to fourteenth- to sixteenth-century English architecture, specifically that of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, without copying any particular model. A set of watercolors documents the design process for University Chapel, which borrowed elements from both French and English precedents. The chapel, at the time the second-largest university chapel in the world, was a place of grandeur but also refuge in the years following the First World War, and it continues to serve as one of the iconic images of the campus. By making an architectural connection between Princeton and its academic predecessors, the University employed the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for American higher education. By 1930, the end date of the exhibition, the Gothic Revival was considered passé in larger architectural circles, yet the continued commissioning of Collegiate Gothic buildings—witness the twenty-first-century Gothic Whitman Hall—speaks eloquently to the power of these buildings to both create and sustain a collective vision of academe in modern America. Johanna G. Seasonwein |
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