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Victorian Art in Britain |
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Brunel & The Art of Invention An Exhibition at Bristol City Art Gallery Commemorating the Bi-Centenary of The Birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
I visited Bristol on 15 April, and after deserting my partner and her family, I made my customary visit to the City Art Gallery. I did not have any prior knowledge of this exhibition, which commemorates the bi-centenary of the birth of Brunel, so I cannot claim any medals for prior research. I set out below information about Brunel, and the pictures on show. I K Brunel, Engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the son of Marc Brunel, an émigré French engineer. Marc Brunel was born near Rouen in 1769, and worked in France until 1794, when he fled from the excesses of the French Revolution to the United States. In 1799 he moved to Britain, and married the daughter of William Kingdom of Plymouth. Their son, the subject of this exhibition, was born in Portsmouth in 1806. Brunel senior had a distinguished career in Britain. He worked for the Woolwich Arsenal, and Chatham Dockyards. However, when his sawmill was burnt down in 1814 he went bankrupt, and was imprisoned for debt. The British Government paid £5000 to secure his release. His largest project was the Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe, which occupied him from 1825 to 1845. He was knighted in 1845, and died in 1849. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was educated in various schools in the South of England. An illustration of his precocious ability follows. As a young boy he told his schoolmaster that a building being constructed near his school would collapse - which it did the same night. After his initial education, he went to France, where he attended the College Henri Quatre in Paris. His education was completed then in his father’s office. He was instrumental in assisting his exhausted father to complete the first Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe. In the early 1830s the younger Brunel planned the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, still in use to this day. He was the Chief Civil Engineer to the Great Western Railway, whose route from London to Bristol was a masterpiece, and is still a brilliant and successful piece of railway engineering to this day. He was also responsible for taking this railway line into both Wales, and Cornwall, with the attendant bridges and large docks. The combination of railways and docks shows the breadth of his vision. He wanted to provide a total service a the railway terminal in one country to a terminal in another for both freight and passengers. I K Brunel’s ship the Great Britain was the first screw driven, iron steamship, capable of inter-continental travel, to use a modern term. This famous ship is berthed in Bristol, remarkably in the dock in which she was completed in 1845. His vastly larger ship the Great Eastern was built under his direction from 1853-1858. The supreme effort involved, and the problems after completion of the ship, finally totally destroyed a constitution undermined by years of overwork, and he died on 15 September 1859. I had omitted to mention that Brunel’s wife was Mary Horsley, sister of John Callcott Horsley RA (1817-1903), painter, and, famously, prude. Horsley was the painter of an excellent portrait of the great man. The Exhibition The exhibition contained many great Victorian pictures, some not usually on view. I found the following of particular interest : Mrs Keane, the famous actress, 1848, by Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859), a striking, and curiously modern image. Nearby was William Powel Frith’s (1819-1909) famous “Railway Station” completed in 1862, this large, famous painting, and social document, making a rare escape from the Royal Holloway College of London University. The breadth, detail, draughtsmanship, and atmosphere in the picture is quite extraordinary.
“Eastward Ho!” By H Nelson O’Neil ARA (1817-1880). Another famous painting, was first exhibited in 1857, and was inspired by troops leaving for the Crimean War. It was a major success at the time, and its pathos, passion and immediacy, are still striking today. Close to this hangs its companion painting “Home Again” showing the same soldiers disembarking to meet their loved ones. Some men maimed, some men wounded, and younger men who left as youths and returning as men.
Yet another painting by the same artist made a great impression on this writer. Called “Parting Cheer,” it shows emigrants leaving by ship for a new life in the colonies. Their families bid them farewell, some in extreme states of distress, many, perhaps realising, they will never see departing friends and relatives again. The painting dated from 1861, and had just as much impact as O’ Neil’s Crimean pictures, with vivid colours, and striking depiction of extreme emotion, and despair.
Strangely enough a painting by Tissot “Portsmouth Dockyard , showing a fortunate army sergeant between two attractive young women fitted well in the above company.
I was next struck by two famous social realism pictures. “Applicants for admission to a Casual Ward,“ By Luke Fildes (1844-1927). Fildes came from Liverpool, and his family had been involved in the movement to improve the conditions of the urban poor for many years, indeed his grandmother had been present at the notorious Peterloo Massacre, in Manchester in 1819. The picture had been conceived as a an engraving for the Graphic Magazine, and had appeared as such on December 1869. The individual pictures are portraits of real people in just this situation, just before the publication of the original engraving. More than one hundred and thirty years after the event, this picture still has the capacity to shock the viewer, and is a salutary reminder of the disgraceful conditions of the urban poor in the nineteenth century.
Another famous picture on show was “On Strike” by Hubert von Herkomer This picture, completed in 1893 was the painter’s Diploma Work, presented to the Royal Academy after his election as an Academician in 1890. The striker, with his wife and child behind him is painted larger than life size, a feature of the picture much-criticized at the time. This adverse comment seems to this writer to have been foolish, and the size of the figure adds to the dignity of the man, and the impact of the picture.
From another extreme comes “The First of May 1851” by Franz Xavier Winterhalter, favourite artist of the subjects of the picture Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, shown with their infant son Prince Arthur, the queen’s favourite son, later the Duke of Connaught. At the behest of Albert, Winterhalter had replaced Sir Francis Grant PRA, as the artist of choice for such pictures by this time. I suspect that Grant would not have produced such a flawless level of finish, but far superior characterization of the sitters. 1 A favourite Victorian novelty picture was “First Class The Meeting” by Abraham Solomon ARA (1824-1862), showing a young man in a sailor’s uniform engaged in conversation with the father of a pretty young woman in a railway carriage. This is actually the second “bowdlerised” version, as in the original subject picture the father was asleep, and the young man was addressing the pretty young woman. This was felt by many observers to be highly immoral - the foolishness of human beings is truly amazing.
Another picture by the same artist at the exhibition was “The Parting-Second Class,” in which a young boy, possibly joining the navy is shown on a train with his mother, from whom he must soon part, a subject heavy with the pathos which appealed to contemporary taste, and with a firm basis of truth.
This remarkable exhibition is worth a visit, both for those interested in Brunel, Victorian art aficionados, or people, who, like me, are both.
PHR 19 March 2006
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