THE VIEW PAINTERS OF EUROPE, and Canaletto; the use of the Camera Ottica

STUDIO SPECIAL NUMBER, British watercolour

STUDIO SPECIAL NUMBER, EARLY ENGLISH WATERCOLOUR DRAWING

The word TOPOGRAPHY in most definitions seems to entail the recording and visualisation of local detail in landscape, human activity (architecture and the economy) and the unfolding of people's lives. Artists described as Topographers were, it was understood of an inferior professional status and aesthetic achievement to those artists who filtered the landscape through their own subjective sensibility.

Cataloguing watercolour drawings for the British Council exhibition in Munich it struck me being perfectly possible at the time of the making of the image to combine a businesslike attitude with extremes of interpretation. Prints and Drawings were deliberately aimed at a clientele who were familiar with the tourist spots of Europe - a celebrated Battle, a place where the Coach stopped for the passengers to view a much vaunted vista. Tourists' Diaries revealed how fixed was that itinerary, and how artists, seeking to sell their work, were willing to work to this constraint. Given the fixities then how wildly at variance were the productions of the British Landscape Artists who celebrated the Lakes, Mountains and crumbling Cathedrals of this Kingdom, the sublimities of continental Europe (Boney permitting) and the exotic otherness of Distant Parts, with their terrifying Elephants, scintillating Ice Flows and ominous citizenry.

Only in scanning examples from the Topographical Colour Books did I begin to realise how much lyrical feeling pervaded the Topographical image, how many eccentric details were included in human dress and behaviour, and how dreamlike the Travel images were, undistorted by Flies, Unreasonable Heat, Banditti and Bedbugs that I for one associate with Holidays. I remember that a major collector of these Topographical Colour Plate books was the journalist and cricket commentator John Arllott. This is for me what travelling should be, enjoying a glass of wine by the the fire scrutinising an artificiality of place in the form of an illustrated book.

Stylistically there is favouring of the linear, the colour infill and the semblance of an optical reality (Camera Lucida, Obscura) while all along the observer's eye is lured deeper into this aquatint confection.