 As Danny mentioned in the chat box, please do let us know where you're joining us from in the world today. Good. Okay, well it's two minutes past 12 and it seems like a good time to begin. Hello and a very warm welcome. It's great to see so many people out there, close to 100 of you so far and more joining as I speak. I'm Richard Johns and I'm joining you from the history of art departments at the University of York and it's my pleasure to introduce and to chair this the second of four webinars in the Paul Mellon Center's graphic landscape series. It's a particular pleasure to be able to introduce today's speakers, John Bonehill, Kate Redford and James Finch, each of whom I've known and whose work I've admired for many years and I've no doubt that following Tuesday's session that we will have an equally stimulating range of ideas and images on the cards for you today under the overarching theme of print and property. Now before I introduce our first speaker there is a few housekeeping items I need to draw to your attention. And I shall read the screen. The session will contain three 20 minute papers followed by a panel discussion and Q and Q&A. After the second paper will be a short 10 minute comfort break. You can type questions using the Q&A function on your screen, and I'd encourage everyone to post any questions that you have as they occur to you and I'll as we go along I'll collate the questions and use, introduce as many of them as I can as part of our final Q&A session. This session will be recorded and made available to the public soon after the series is ended. Close captioning is available and to access that simply press the CC button on the bottom right of the screen and select show subtitles. Good so without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce our first speaker John Bonehill. John teaches art history at the University of Glasgow and many of you will know John already as a formidable and collaborative historian of landscape through as many publications and exhibitions, including an exhibition and book on William Hodges produced with Jeff Quilley in 2004. And in 2009, a Royal Academy exhibition Paul Sanby picturing Britain with Stephen Daniels. Both of those were really landmark events that brought the work of Hodges and Sanby to life in innovative and unexpected ways and which crucially brought the work of both artists to the attention of a much wider audience than before. Recently, John has co-authored a new book Old Ways New Road travels in Scotland 1720 to 1832. And among other projects he's currently working on a book on estate portraiture in Britain 1660 to 1832. And I'm guessing John that today's paper relates closely to that project and the title of John's talk today is the estate landscape and the late 18th century print print market. Over to you, John. Thank you Richard. That's for such a generous and kind introduction and for the plug of the books as well. I greatly appreciate it. And thanks as well to Mark and Felicity for the invitation to speak. I'm just delighted to see this interest in late 80s and early 19th century British landscape. Let me quickly share my screen with you all. I hope that that's showing up okay. So, I'll begin. So, in his essay on landscape painting, which was published in 1783, the young clergyman and minor poet Joseph Holden Pot advanced what he called a few hints for forming the taste of an English school in the arts. The artists need only turn to their native country scenic charms as he viewed them against the great variety and beauty of our northern skies, he argued, to distinguish themselves from continental masters which towards the end of the American war in the aftermath of the dark period of domestic unrest, political division and threatened invasion, hot call for a national landscape school chimed with the sentiments of others who looked to the native territory for a look to the practicalities of making a living in these troubled times, which has seen a notable slump of late in the art market. Pot's essay on landscape paid attention to developments in related fields and the opportunities they presented, making the case that artists in the line might capitalize on the success of an ingenious place maker and noted print maker. That is the landscaper capability Brown and the engraver William William Woolett. Pot's pairing of these figures of Brown and Woolett yolks together the world of the rural estate and the urban print market, the country and the city and speaks to their relationship. But in highlighting the role of these two figures and laying the ground for the school of landscaping envisaged, but also drew attention to the dual importance of the landed estate and the reproductive print to what Connell Shields memorably termed the wider business of landscaping. Members of the London art world of the day anxious to assert their academic liberal credentials may have expressed his taste at the thought of a mere gardener like Brown exerting such authority, but as pot clearly recognized the place makers business the extraordinary success of which that was provoked much of the hostility created numerous opportunities for architects sculptors painters and print makers alike. The shifting scenic attractions or moving pictures as they were turned of increasingly informal Parkland layouts popularized by the likes of Brown, William Eaves, Richard Woods, or their lesson and contemporaries that certainly provided will it with some of these earliest successes. A print after his own design with its view of the gardens at Colton house showcased the engravers trademark dense hatching and extraordinary tonal range. Published in 1760 by a consortium of London publishers, led by John Tinney, will its view of the Royal Gardens was one of the six part series of prints. There's also took in the estate landscapes of foot, Craig, Coombank, Pains Hill and Hall Barn, just so three of the Prince here. So it's a mix of royal aristocratic gentry and with a state of Bushier cleave and affluent merchants properties. Such pictorial surveys in print of the nation's great houses and landed estates had long been a vital aspect of the business of landscapery. And here I want to briefly outline key features of the market for serial prints of the landed estate in the latter part of the 18th century, with a particular focus on the years around age 1780. When pot was writing and when such publications proliferated. The marketing reflected a broad interest in the estate and its depiction, apparently in various publications, reflecting notably on the legacies of the improving hands of capability Brown, who passed away in early 1783, which championed the distinctly English character of his natural style on one hand, yet dismissed it as the idol of the age showy and tasteless on the other. This interest in the estate astounded to those polite urban dwellers who lacked the resources to build such domains, and whose attitudes were indeed as likely to be censorous as curious. The making and meaning of print series focused on the celebration of the estate landscape, involving collaborations between publishers printmakers, artists and importantly their patrons was increasingly inflected by wider anxieties over the improvement of landed property and the erosion of customary motives of existence. The extended property had featured prominently in London's still novel public art exhibitions of the 1760s and 70s, as well as the print culture of the period. So I show here Paul Samby's Southeast view of Hackwood, the city was graced the Duke of Bolton, which was exhibited one of a series of four estate views that Samby showed at the Society of Artists in 1764. The pictures displayed a painter's patronage and skill, as well as the owner's taste and encouragement of the fine arts. Producing, exhibiting, and then publishing what were almost exclusively commissioned views of the estates of the nation's gentry and ability was not just an effective promotional strategy for artists. They were no less concerned to parade the improvement of their country's seats on the walls of the London showrooms or in the series and volumes of prints surveying the nation's localities that were to be marketed in ever greater numbers from the mid 1770s. The displays and publications of this kind helped coordinate Britain's localities and regions in people's minds as a complex but ordered and harmonious Mosaic of landed power. And there is a sense in which the landed estate and its fortunes was in some sense seen as a barometer of the relative progress of the country as a whole. Part of the polite geographies at the time, set out in maps, travel, literature and poetry, such images helped to expel the virtues of personal property and private land ownership as the foundation of a modern society. Hoping to codify the complex range of meanings landed property came to assume for their owners and polite society as a whole. By the second half of the 18th century, the state portrait really evolved into a multifaceted category of pictorial art, sometimes culturally ambitious, other times more conservative and aesthetically muted in character. Not only because it was so blatantly commercial in motivation, partly as the taking of a likeness was thought of merely mechanical act, a matter of copying, not invention. The genre did not find favor with academic theorists or more academically inclined practitioners. Gainsborough's rebirth of overtures from Philip York, second Earl of Hardwick to paint on his newly acquired estates, is an especially well-known instance of such prejudice. The artist declaring the quote with regards to real views from nature in this country, he had never seen any place that affords the subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gasper and Claude. Despite or perhaps because of the misgivings of some, the aspirations to academic respectability that prompted remarks of this nature spurred others into raising their game. The emergence of an increasingly professionalized art establishment, establishing the conditions for more elevated brands of estate flourished. Works by the likes of George Barrett, Richard Wilson and Paul Samby that appeared at public exhibition and subsequently in print in these years demonstrate how leading practitioners advanced the genre, developing it into a form of landscape art that was both closely observed and highly imaginative. Marrying detailed matters of facts with a broad range of biographical, historic, literary or pictorial illusion that worked to amplify the meaning of the locality depicted. The artist taking a high degree of care to reassure the viewer of the picture's fidelity to the scene, whether through the accumulation of precise detail or its alignment with landmarks as seen from an identifiable vantage point. The tendency to take works in the genre's red that face value as it were to label them topographical without necessarily a clear understanding of what that highly complex designation might mean. Broadingly it's a category of picture making that has attracted the attention of architectural and garden historians rather more than art historians. Indeed it's a category of picture making that is featured but rarely in the literature on landscape art, hardly figuring in the ideologically charged accounts of the genre that appeared in 1980s and 90s, despite its obvious relevance to some of the issues that lined large in those studies, such notably politics of land use, and the notable exception of David Salkins Wilson catalogue aside. This is to all overlook arguably the considerable complexity power and scope of the state portraiture, as well as its near ubiquity, the genre featuring in the portfolio of all but one or two of the leading landscape exponents of the period. It was in the words of Joseph Farrington quote a sort of landscape portrait painting by which a good deal of money was to be made with patrons paying well and the possibility of the work also making it into print. So while the more high minded or those who had lucrative sidelines like Gainsborough might choose to distance themselves from a genre largely shaped and restricted by patrons demands, and which appeared to be a little opportunity for the display of a distinctive artistic sense of sensibility. There were those, as I said, who looked to raise the cultural register and imaginative scope of the state court. In their hands, such pictures made powerful visual statements about an owner's place and position geographically and socially, nationally, as well as locally evoking evoking widening spheres of influence, larger settings and meanings. So serial formats helps evoke these connections. Serial formats were a feature of the genre from the beginning in oil and watercolour as well as print. In examples focused on individual properties, as with Holler's start in benchmark suite of etched views of the Earl of Arundel's Albury estate in Surrey, or Robert Thacker's no less remarkable, Lunkford Castle, Wiltshire set, made to illustrate a history of the Coleraine family. In both of these series, the scenes are not discreet, they're not confined by a single viewpoint within a single frame, but part of an expansive series, which surveyed the estates from different aspects, and also at different moments. They feature episodes of a rival or departure, as you can see in the first, what I think is the title page of Holler's Albury Suite, for instance, alluding therefore to the restorative pleasures of temporary rural. Retirement, or show figures, family members perhaps, acting out the duties of landownership. Giving arms to the poor, for instance, and the gates outside here of Lunkford Castle, or else strolling the grounds, the shifts in perspective and occluded elements replicating their experience of walking the bounds of their property. Indeed, in Holler's series, the images on the right hand side mark out a very precisely plotted and measured edge of the boundary of the estate. And being drawn up to accompany a family genealogy, Thacker's Lunkford series, as far from unusual, views of landed estates being a mainstay of county histories and topographies beginning with Dougdale's, William Dougdale's foundational Warwickshire volume, where they appeared alongside other visual cues to ancestry and lineage in the form of plates of heraldry and funeral monuments and interleaved with pedigrees and histories of tenure. And this is all worth noting, as compilations of this kind, which were to remain a feature of the market well into the early 19th century, were a model for the expanded countrywide survey, compiled by Yang Kipp and Leonard Knife, and eventually published by David Murray in 1707, as Britannia in the Strata. Assumptuous series of geographically disparate gentlemen's seats, Britannia in the Strata mounted a collective patriotic spectacle of landed wealth, significantly enough in the year of the active union. This was a project of indeed national imagine imagining, affording the subscriber the opportunity to admire improvements and the quality and patronage of the visual arts, as well as the reformation of the country's estates after the devastations of the preceding century. These select examples from the history, early history of the genre in Britain are useful to an understanding of later developments in this most heritage like of pictorial genres, not least as many of these contexts and features remain central to the works in the line, and as many had remarked the extended shelf life, being reissued or else remained in Prince Sellers catalogs for many years. And although we often think of Prince of course as essentially an ephemeral media, they have a remarkable kind of longevity at times. The serial formats, as they developed over the next century or so, especially as they focused on an individual property conveyed a sense of movement, as much to time, the space, allowing various kinds of stories of a more or less dramatic kind to unfold between the images, as well as within them. State portraiture was indeed always as much a way of telling, as of seeing a means of relating and situating stories of different kinds. In this it's significant that they were often closely tied to a moment of transition or occasion, commemorating change on the ground in the form of a grand architectural landscaping scheme, as with Samby's views of an park, for instance. But they also chart lives, matters of connection and pedigree land in life, to take a likeness of a place, or make a study of its character, meant also capturing something of its owner. Now the market for serial prints of landed estates fluctuates considerably over the course of the 18th century, temporarily disappearing, for instance, in the 1760s, despite the fact that oils and watercolours of in the genre featured prominently in the new art exhibitions of that decade. They were to proliferate following the successful launch of schemes, such as George Kearsley and Paul Samby's A Collection of Landscapes, which began publication in 1777 as a spin-off of the earlier series, The Copper Plate Night Theme, and indeed William Watts, The Seats of Inability and Gentry, in a collection of the most interesting and picturesque views, the first prints of which were issued two years later. Both the collection of landscapes and what seats drew heavily on reproductions of pictures which were first exhibited publicly a decade or so earlier. So were drawn from commission works with the owner's patronage flagged up prominently in the titling and the accompanying letterpress, which would invariably also take in the country adjacent to. Plates are presented as both a part of a procession of readily consumable separate scenes and a more or less unified series to be judged one against another or as a whole. I should say there is a tremendous amount of recycling going on across these various schemes. So for instance, some of Samby's estate views not only appear in a collection of landscapes, they appear in the other serial publications such as The Copper Plate Magazine, The Virtuoso's New Magazine, 150 views, etc. He's always looking to recycle works. Now, working on as the chief engraver and publisher, Watts Seats was perhaps the most extensive venture of this kind in the period. It attracted about 600 or so subscribers of a diverse social mix and residing in the regions as well as the capital. The first place being marketed in early 1779. In your chimpy venture, Watts relied initially on Samby's name, but later featured views after major players like George Barrett, two works that you can see on the right hand side there by Barrett, one of Burton Constable in Yorkshire, and an above and Lord Clive seated Clive Stale. Later on in the series, however, it begins to feature the work of younger artists like William Hodges and Humphrey Repton, as well as various amateurs. But towards the end of the run, Watts was featuring views either after his own work or which went completely unattributed based on drawings most likely supplied by regionally based draftsmen. In ill health and financial difficulty, Watts was increasingly reliant on collectors interest in estate landscapes over artists with a market profile. It's also meant that plates were not always done with the encouragement or even the permission of the owners of the estates or the pictures with some probably based on studies made on the slide. Watts being met quote with disagreeable treatment when making drawings of Chiswick, where he had long been a role forbidding visitors from sketching. The collection of landscapes was a formal focused venture, stylistically and thematically comprising just 32 plates, all after Sambie and engraved by Edward Rooker or his son Michelangelo Rooker with the odd contribution from Watts. Words and images here in the plates in the letterpress address the implications of improvement for a range of individual states and surrounding localities and so the nation at large surveying a mostly orderly and flourishing series of regional landscapes. When bound the series took on a distinctively tall like quality, the views invariably focused on the approaches and drives of the grand houses surveyed a sense enhanced by the accompanying letterpress which gives a quote description of the place and the adjacent country. And which will on occasion provide the records at degrees of local detail that the images in the some way rely on their meaning. Needless to say such images targeted and helped promote the growing domestic tourism of the period, which ensured a state views as a genre, an audience well beyond its primary sponsors out among the polite leisure classes, increasingly increasingly curious to consume and learn about the country's localities, including the lifetimes and lands of its leading families. When he was alert to the various claims on a place, increasingly charged and contentious status of the land of the states of the period is evident from two paired views of the Duke of Grafton's Wakefield large in Northamptonshire, which opened the collection They're both after designs drawn up a decade or so earlier, and both probably, and at least two of versions of which were exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1767. In the first which opens the series the focus is on the mansion designed by William Kent, seen in perspective and close up, as if the viewers carriage is arriving as another parts. The author of the accompanying letterpress, however, makes any passing weapons to the architecture, choosing to direct their comments instead to the view of the adjacent country, invited by Samby's design. It situates this elegantly treat in the most delightful spot in Littlebury Forest, where art in nature combined to form a terrestrial paradise. This the author contrasts tellingly with the decline of the local landscape beyond, referring the bleak contentions around the estate a decade previously. Noting how, quote, many of the neighboring villages were formally allowed the use of common in this forest, but they had now been deprived of their privilege, which has greatly contributed to the depopulating of the adjacent country. The second print, by contrast, is a more serious farm like scene, a Georgic rather than a pastoral image, stocked with industrious figures, laborers were under the watchful eye of the steward on his pony, who are having harvested the haught lawn for hay and readiness for winter have clearly earned their rest break. In the letterpress, there is, quote, no further description of this pleasing spot, the eloquence of the plate rendering it unnecessary. Taken together, the two scenes and their textual commentary admits the contest over this landscape, only for the imagery of harmony and good order to then allay any sense of anxiety or thick or friction. Now I'm conscious here at the time and there was more that I was wanting to say to give out images of individual estates. But I'll perhaps end by saying that, despite tendency for scholars to think about a state portraiture, largely in terms of views of the country house, something which the examples I've had chance to include here, perhaps rather reinforces. It's important to stress that serial publications in the line will rarely so confined. Indeed, it's often difficult, maybe possible, at times to distinguish between what to view a private property, and what's a view of the landscape in general. Views of the states, however, are just as likely to address other assets and signs of ownership as the house or the landscape core features of the working estate, as well as antiquities and natural wonders, as with John Warwick Smith hafford views will also feature. Smith's views of hafford are a series which explicitly connected the owner, Thomas Jones is concerned to promote Wales as a touring landscape, worth writing about sketching and painting. And like other landowners, he also understood the graphic landscape as a means of displaying and promoting his place and position in that landscape. I'll end there. Thank you, John. That was fascinating. I look forward to returning to those images in our discussion later. I'm going to move straight on now to our second speaker, Kate Retford. Kate is Professor of Art History at Birkbeck University of London. And among many distinguished publications, Kate's probably best known for two books both published by the Paul Mellon Center, which in different ways explore the relationship between portraiture and and the country house and much more besides, including from 2006, The Art of Domestic Life, and more recently, 2017, The Conversation Piece, which was joint winner of the historians of British art prize for the best single author book in its period in its year of publication. Kate's currently developing a project looking at the presentation of the country house as family home. And this year is holding a leave a human research fellowship. With the aim of writing a book about print rooms in 18th century country houses. And again, Kate, I'm assuming that your paper today relates in some way to that project and Kate's paper is titled views of the lakes at the vine. Kate, over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you for that kind introduction. I'm very impressed that you've got our publications they're ready to hold up to the camera. It's a real pleasure to be here and to be taking part of in this. I did also just want to say quickly before I began a big thank you to the staff at the vine who've been enormously helpful with the particular aspect of my research on on print rooms that I'm presenting today. So let me share my screen. So, I feel something of an interloper in the session my paper today isn't actually about prints of a property. In fact, the print series I want to discuss was primarily popular as showing a rural landscape held as untouched by the hand of art, the Lake District. This is Joseph Farrington's 20 views of the lakes in Cumberland and Westmoreland published between 1784 and 1789 by William Byrne. I'm partly concerned with these prints as property with their production marketing ownership and uses material objects. Above all though, I want to think about these prints in property, their use in the print room at the vine in Hampshire, created by Caroline Wiggett, her aunt and her brothers around 1817. Caroline was a relative who had been adopted by the childless William and Elizabeth due to around 1803, but she'd been allowed to have her siblings to visit as she got older. She later wrote powerfully in her memoirs about how much it had meant to spend time, quote, with those who really belong to me. On the occasion of the making of the print room, the presence of her brothers had been particularly valued as she'd lately been ill with the measles. There was plenty of material at the house to provide grist to their paper mill, as they worked in what Caroline notes was the warmest room in the building. She records, the prints had always been kept in a portfolio in the gallery on large block stalls, presumably referring to one of the portfolios of finest prints at the vine remarked on by Caroline Libby Powys in 1780. The collection included some particularly significant prints acquired by John Chute in the mid 18th century, and Caroline's brother William looked back on the inclusion of some of these in the print room decidedly roofily, once he had come unexpectedly to inherit the house and its contents. I quote, the print room was covered with prints by the late Mrs Chute and her nieces in about the year 1815, and I gave some little assistance by cutting out some borders for them. Some of the engravings are too valuable for such a situation. However, the family did also use more recently acquired prints, such as two Richard Dodd maritime scenes, undoubtedly included in the mood of post war patriotism recorded in Caroline's memoirs. In the year 1815 our long war with France was at an end when the country was almost wild with joy. Studying the fabric of the surviving print room at the vine is a fraught business as the National Trust undertook substantial restoration work in the late 1950s, replacing damaged and lost prints. However, close study and comparison with photographs that predate the trust's work shows that many more of the prints are original than had previously been thought. Some have been replaced in different positions, but the West wall is almost intact in both material and arrangement. This is a typically eclectic display for a print room wall, ranging through French British and Italian material across the 17th and 18th centuries, and through genre portraiture landscape religious and historical works. And it's also typical of such schemes in featuring a number of print series. As Anthony Griffiths has effectively elucidated publishing prints in series was an attractive commercial venture and we're hearing a lot about this through through these seminars. As well as offering flexibility and spreading costs for both publisher and consumer they were also adaptable. They could be bound in book form or kept in portfolios or albums, or they could be displayed on a wall and increasingly popular option in the second half of the 18th century. The marketing of print series in John Bowles catalogs is instructive here. In 1731 a large section devoted to series of prints is simply framed as fine sets of prints. In 1749 a little extra marketing has been added, being agreeable furniture for the curious. In 1764 the same sets of prints are presented, either for collections in the cabinets of the curious, or to be used as furniture to ornament rooms. As furniture print series could be framed and glazed or they could be pasted straight onto the walls. In the 1760s and 70s this was an explicitly advertised option in print sellers catalogs, most notably in Robert Sayer's weighty tone of 1774, which offered fine sets proper for the collections in the cabinets of the curious. Elegant and gentile ornaments when framed and glazed, and maybe fitted up in a cheaper manner to ornament rooms staircases etc with curious borders representing frames a fashion much in use. Such print sellers constantly appealed to the assorted desires of the market, both exploiting and driving a culture in which print was variously used and remediated. Series of prints of almost any genre were valuable in creating print rooms. They provided a good number of images in one fell swoop. They helped in creating structure and symmetry, often through thematically united prints of the same direction dimensions. And they created strands of coherence encouraging the engaged viewer to trace sets running through the display. The series used at the vine were largely not bought for these purposes, but they served them well. At least five prints came from John Boydell's Houghton Gallery project of 1775. Whilst only those in the know would recognize these disparate and variously proportioned prints as a set. William Hogarth's Four Times of Day relies on the full series pasted in order to make sense of its narrative sequence. The extended horizontal format of a number of prints after Julia Romano's frescoes makes a particularly notable contribution to the pattern making in the room. And two graphic landscape series have been utilized. Two of the eight most extraordinary prospects in the mountainous parts of Derbyshire and Staffordshire have been included, although that pair was later repositioned by the trust. Notable are the six plates from Farrington's views of the lakes, all in their original positions in a row that extends across the West wall and part of the north. Before going into this series and its usage in more detail, it's worth emphasizing that I'm not claiming particular significance for Farrington's views in this display. Indeed, my conclusion will be that I think they're actually less important than other prints in the room. However, they offer a rich opportunity for thinking about the purchasing and use of such prints, the degree to which they become different objects as variously deployed, and the consequent refraction of their meaning. This will be an account primarily engaged with current work on histories of the book and print culture concerned with materiality, and above all, with the diverse ways in which people interacted with print to use the phrase of the multi graph collective. Farrington's model for publishing and selling his views of the lakes was a standard one. He had lived and worked in Cumbria through the later 1770s building up a stock of views. This handwritten list, it gestures at the decision making process around which to include in the print project he embarked on with William Byrne, who did some of the engraving work as well as publishing the series. Issue one consisting of six prints at one pound six shillings kicked off with a proposal in the third edition of Thomas West's popular and substantial guide to the lakes published in 1784. Plans for the following views were rather vague in this advertisement, allowing for freedom of maneuver, but an intention to provide letterpress descriptions in both English and French was clearly stated. That proposed first number was issued in 1786. Numbers two and three four prints each 18 shillings a turn followed in 1787 and 1788. The project was then wrapped up with the fourth number consisting of six prints, and the issuing of that promised letterpress penned by William Cookson Wordsworth uncle. The now availability of the complete publication was heralded with a big advertising push, and the series was ready to be bound as a book and kept on library shelves. Intriguingly, the six views of the lakes at the vine of the six prints of the first number. It's not possible that the troops own the whole set of 20, but the fact that Caroline and her family used all of the first six and apparently solely those six does make it seem more likely that they only got that far. I think we're seeing here that flexibility built into print production in action, a purchase of buying only the first number of a series, and thus fracturing the overarching vision but doing so in a fully facilitated manner. In the vine's purchase the troops views were as Caroline notes kept in a portfolio on one of those large block stalls in the vines oak gallery. These are actually benches more than stalls and portfolios placed on top of them would have invited scrutiny, providing sufficient space to lay open the boards and to sift through the loose prints within. As such, Farrington's views would have been handled and manipulated, was their fixed position in the parlor downstairs subsequently shifted the owners of movement fully onto the viewers body. In the portfolio, Farrington's prints would also crucially have been seen with their inscriptions. Take plate three for example, the main text central larger in size the place names capitalized gives the location of the depicted vista. This is positioned on the west bank of Derwent water, looking north in the direction of Keswick and towards Skiddle, which dominates the skyline in this area. Directly underneath we have the publication information both legally required and a means of advertisement, enabling tracking in the print market. The smallest inscriptions to either side give Farrington as the artist and Benjamin Pouncy as the engraver of this particular view. In the typical in print room schemes, all this key information, a vital component of the object of the print was lost through both the trimming of the impression and the application of a border. Such borders amplified the visual dynamic of the natural frame created by the plate mark on the print, but included the letterpress which that plate mark normally contained. The print was thus translated from an intermediate object into a purely visual one, looking back both to Farrington's preparatory drawing and or watercolor and ahead to its destination in a paper museum on the parlor walls. We're now into the realm of the Trompe-Loi picture hang at the vine. Compared with other picture displays, the relative affordability and availability of prints greatly expanded the potential field of material. Roger De Peel noted in his survey of the usefulness and use of prints, we may make use of so greater number and so different. Key elements of visual, thematic and narrative logic are at work on the intact section of the West wall, and only Nathaniel dances, timing of Athens at the top is a later addition here. We have that use of all of the four times a day by Hogarth, logically displayed in a sequence across the top. Francesco Bartolozzi's famed print, after Anibali Caracci's Madonna del Silencio, forms an effective centerpiece to a cluster of religious works. Groups of the Holy Family to either side, flanked in turn by single figures of saints, Mary and St Francis, both gazing heavenwards in a state of rapture. The large Romano picks up on those running along the bottom of the wall providing a shift in proportion and helping to navigate the size of Richard Earlham's mezzotint after Franz Snyder's fruit market below. It also sits between logically paired portraits of Johnson and Shakespeare by George Virtue, and most significantly here encourages us to see the six landscapes that curve around that central group as a unit. The four Farrington views on this wall are thus connected with the print after Hermann van Spijnveld's Happy Peasants to the left, and an engraving after Napolitano's Les Choudos to the right, all landscapes featuring rivers and lakes populated by ostentatiously contented and occupied rural folk. The Farrington series is thus both truncated in the display and extended, topographical views of the Lake District joined with continental landscapes in the name of visual contiguity. The six plates have also been reordered for the benefit of the display, exploiting a flexibility clearly not available with Hogarth's narrative series above, which relies on the visual dynamic of reading order. Views featuring trees flank the Sniders, the clumps to either side creating an effect of repertoire's whilst the outer prints depict more open and rockier landscapes. This visual logic continues as the series runs around to the north wall with the notable left to right dynamic of the Granges composition on the right of your screens here, created by the tree and rocky outcrop on the left and continued by the bridge. And this effect underscores the importance of engaging with corners and cross views in these print room displays as well as elevations. On first scrutiny, the fact that this arrangement mixes up Farrington's designated sequence seems to matter a little. After all, one of the advantages of issuing prints in numbers was that it could accommodate different rates of progress amongst the engravers involved, and the individual plates were indeed published out of sequence. Furthermore, that preliminary list in West's guide has a different running order. However, there clearly was some intended progression through the first number, and it's particularly evident that the first plate was conceived as an inaugural scene. Its title flags the breadth of this view from Ashness. That was then underscored by Cookson's letterpress, which emphasised that the print was intended to give a general view of Derwent water. The viewpoint Cookson explains was chosen to show the several features which distinguish the romantic Vale of Keswick, ahead of the focus of the following views on selected particular locale around the lake, such as the village of the Grange or Lodore Falls. However, at the vine, this introductory plate is tucked into the display, now the fourth in the sequence. Whilst loose impressions of these prints flag their intended order only through discrete numbers at top right, it's in bound volumes, including the letterpress that Farrington's sequence is fixed and amplified. Here one moves from each landscape in turn to Cookson's discussion on the following page, the parallel English and French not only indicating an intended international market, but also conveying a more diffuse impression of significance and sophistication. Whilst there's a sprinkling of information about historical sites, much of Cookson's text relates to geography and terrain, a few geological facts are noted, and the issue of natural flux is considered in light of Farrington's efforts to provide exact views. But the most pronounced feature is the language of the picturesque with the piece of romantic fails contrasted with the drama of impending mountains and particular appreciation shown for the wildest and most romantic scenes. Building on precedents such as John Dalton's poetic description of the rough rocks of dread Lodore, that waterfall prompts the most emotive account, one of the most striking objects of the kind in this country, uncommonly picturesque and grand. Cookson's accounts are also intertextual, embedding the views of the lakes within the broader literature available about the Lake District by the late 1780s. He quotes from Thomas Gray's 1769 journal, as well as the work of Gray's biographer William Mason. As John Murray has emphasized, Farrington was a great admirer of Gray, an early possessor of Mason's volume of and about the poet and he had a mind to illustrate the journal. William Gilpin's recently published observations relative chiefly to picturesque beauty of 1786 is also quoted by Cookson at length. The mutually reinforcing visual and literary construction of the Lake District, the cross referencing and recycling of comment choice phrases and selected views that persists to this day, routinely extended and deep and such accounts. A notable example of this is the second edition of West's Guide to the Lakes published after the author's death, enriched with a number of other texts as a denda including Gray's journal. The third edition trailed Farrington's views as previously noted, while the fifth edition published in 1793 included the full list of published views amongst its additional matter. We also see such reciprocity between Farrington and Gilpin. Gilpin 1786 observations had included a proving comment on the earliest published views, the most accurate and beautiful views of that romantic country. The loop was enclosed when Gilpin's text was then quoted in the letterpress written by Cookson to accompany those very views. When Farrington's first six plates were issued, the letterpress had not yet been produced, its publication flagged the culmination of the set and marked its full configuration as a book of prints. It's vital for the significance and undoubted influence of the publication and its position within the broader cultural representation of Cumbria in this period. The absence of this material at the vine considerably extends the routine absence of inscriptions in print rooms, a loss of intermedial complexity of contextualizing information and of the intertextuality of the prose. But it's also worth remembering the critical gap between the material qualities of the context of the bound book and the print room wall at stake in the comparison here. We have not only the fixed sequence in the book, compared to its mixing up in the display, but also the embodied experience of turning pages, tightening and restricting the business of browsing through prints in a portfolio, as opposed to the more fluid process of viewing wall. We have the need to view each individual print in turn, with only low level connectivity between sheets embedded in the visibility of ink and the indentations of letterpress on bursos, without the opportunity of juxtaposition available in the print room display. The processes of remediation at stake for Farrington's views at the vine give I think particularly rich insight into the inviting mutability of printed material in this period. Looking at the history of domestic tourism and the Lake District in the 1780s, Farrington's was a significant, much heralded and much cited publication. Looking at the west wall of the vine print room, these prints become more generic views of lakes and mountains, sitting easily alongside landscapes by banged Spain belt and the Poletano, perhaps adding cumbria to the continent as a notable local for sites of natural beauty. But perhaps rather dissolving into a broadly pleasing impression of the picturesque. In fact, thanks to the juxtaposition of Farrington's views with more immediately visually striking and complex scenes, such as Snyder's fruit market, as well as their subordinate positioning to either side of the inexorably prioritised centre. They seem to function I think predominantly as foil as background. A key component of the densely interwoven body of late 18th century Lake District tourist material, become something less significant in service to the formal imperatives of this print room. But it would be a mistake to set up the bound volumes of Farrington's Lakes produced from 1789 onwards as the apogee, and this use of the first six of its prints as an unsympathetic appropriation. To emphasise this was not only a period in which people interacted with print in various and creative ways. It was also one in which such interaction was invited by those working in the print business. It was rooted in the initial availability of those prints as loose sheets issued in numbers. Finally, this is my last paragraph, the muted way in which the vines were used at the vine in 1817 was surely helped along by the rapid expansion and development of that tourist material over the near three decades since Farrington series have been completed. That rapidity is effectively flagged in the mention of the views by James Plumtree in his gently satirical the Lakers of 1798. Farrington is puffed in the prologue for his matchless views of Cumbria. However, this is immediately undercut by a footnote. Although Farrington's are perhaps the best and most faithful representations he had taken some liberties. And if Plumtree had written the prologue after the opening of the exhibition for the present year he would have lauded Turner instead. He had only just encountered the Lake District and key prints after his views wouldn't be published for some time to come. But the direction of artistic travel at stake here bought those romantic and sublime qualities laid out in Cookson's text, much more emphatically to the imagery of the Lake District. As Murray has commented Farrington's landscapes are notably calm and subdued. By the time the print room was being pieced together at the vine, these views had not only become immersed in a still broader field of print material about the Lake District, they were also no longer at its forefront. Thanks. Thank you CK very much. It's fascinating to see how the graphic landscape works from within the country house and how Farrington's views could be rearranged and recontextualized as part of that display I'm sure the West wall will provoke a lot of discussion later on. So again, we'll come back to you later I think everyone now deserves a short screen break. So we will reconvene in 10 minutes at 10 past one for our third and final paper and discussion so please rest your eyes and we'll see you soon. Thank you. Welcome back, everybody. We've got some great questions coming in pleased to keep posting your questions, either for individual speakers or for the panel as a whole and we'll get through as many as those as we can. And the third speaker, who it's a great pleasure to introduce now, James Finch James is assistant curator of 19th century British art at Tate Britain, where he's worked on many exhibitions including Bangor from Britain, William Blake and turners modern world most recently which was a great success despite the best efforts of the pandemic to close it down and to keep it closed. James has also been a curatorial assistant at the Royal Academy, and before that wrote a PhD thesis on the art criticism of David Sylvester. And in that vein is also published essays on artists including Lucian Freud Barnett Newman and Alberto Giacometti. And to that already impressive portfolios I know James has also written brilliantly on the response of 18th century British artists, including printmakers to the work of the 17th century Italian landscape painter, Salvatore Rosa. And when I first met James, he was working at Grove and the Prince in Covent Garden surrounded from floor to ceiling by etchings and engravings of all kinds including of course graphic landscapes. So he was then and remains today immersed in the graphic landscape and James is talking to us today on Amelia Long's views of Bromley Hill. James over to you. Thanks very much Richard for that lovely introduction and thanks to the organizers for having me. Yeah, thanks for mentioning my time at Grove and the Prince because that's really what started me off on the subject of today's paper. To speak today about the work of Amelia Long, a gifted landscape artist working in the early years of the 19th century. Long is known chiefly as a water colorist. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, and also at the British Institution, and her watercolors are now held in a number of major collections. These include the British Museum, Tate, the Yale Center for British Art, the Whitworth National Gallery Scotland, and the McManus in Dundee, which was bequeathed more than 20 works from a distant relative of the artist, and where the only major exhibition of her work was held in 1980. The focus of this paper however is Long's work as a princemaker. She seems to have made around 30 prints primarily for consumption within her immediate circle rather than for exhibition and commercial sale. The two prints shown here are both small etchings seemingly produced individually and typical of the work of many skilled amateur print makers. Amelia's husband Charles for instance, also made occasional prints such as those seen here. Amelia however also produced two sets of prints more expansive in their ambition. She was an early exponent of lithography, which I'll speak about more later. And in that medium she produced a set of views of continental Europe, following trips between made there between 1815 and 1819, when she was one of the first British artists to visit the continent following the Napoleonic Wars. Before that, however, she made the series of nine etched views of Bromley Hill, which I'll speak about today. And I think that there's actually a small mistake that I made in the title of my paper as it is listed in the program because in which it's listed as views from Bromley Hill, rather than views of. And I think that kind of confusion of the proposition that I made initially is interesting in thinking about what John was saying about the function that these views serve because we're actually looking here of views which are primarily of the surroundings and of the estate but not of the house itself. These prints exemplified by the view of Bromley Hill shown here seem to me to occupy a transitional place in the landscape of topographical printmaking in the late Georgian period, moving away from the picturesque topography of the 18th century and towards the work of Cotman, Crome and others. I should state that this is very much work in progress and that there's much that I'm yet to discover about these prints, but I hope that this will serve as a useful summation of what is known about the prints and their maker. Bromley, near the site of these prints, is now very much part of southeast London, but at the time they were made in the early 1800s, it was a tiny hamlet, 10 miles from the city and known chiefly as the residence of the Bishop of Rochester. Amelia and her husband Charles Long purchased the property in 1801 supposedly owing to its proximity to William Pitt's residence in nearby Keston. Pitt and Charles were friends from studying at Cambridge and Charles's nascent political career as MP for seats such as Midhurst and Wendover owed much to his allegiance with Pitt. Pitt bought Holwood near to his family's seat of Hayes Place in 1785 and expanded the estate and added buildings over the next 15 years. I show this copper engraving of the house to demonstrate the tradition of reproductive engravings of country seats that Amelia and her contemporaries were moving away from. When Pitt engaged Humphrey Rapton to work on the landscaping of Holwood in 1792, Charles Long was in fact the intermediary, but when the longs acquired Bromley Hill, they transformed the house and its grounds themselves. They were not short on expertise to call upon, as it said that their friend Richard Paine Knight may have been an influence and Amelia's mother was a well known horticulturist. In the words of George Cumberland, he wrote a text about the house. All there was to work upon at Bromley was a fine rising knoll extending to about 40 acres of wood on an uneven hill, three or four low meadows, a winding brook that belted them and a surrounding head of pure water. The longs transformed the house and its surroundings into 130 acres of spacious lawn, wooded grounds, winding waterways and rock garden with two picturesque walks of a mile each. The house and gardens thus improved, it became a meeting place for artists and royalty, including George IV and William IV, a scene for political negotiations and the subject of much of Amelia's work as an artist. The watercolor shown here of a building in the grounds strikes me as a form of self portraiture, in which Amelia's portfolio and possessions figure as a way of inserting herself into the Bromley landscape. Long's artistic career was no doubt due in part to her family background, which was not only affluent but rich in culture. Her father, Sir Abraham Hume, was a wealthy collector, whose extensive collection included masterpieces by Bellini, Titian and Rembrandt, while her husband Charles was also at the centre of the British art establishments. A founding governor of the British institution and the trustee of both the British Museum and the National Gallery, Charles was the art advisor to George IV and known as the spectacles of the king. Charles, whose inherited wealth derived from plantations in Jamaica, worked by enslaved people, also formed a collection which was small but high in quality. The group of pictures he assembled, which included works by Gainsborough and Gaspar Dugay, are now mostly in the National Gallery. In the house at Bromley Hill, these works hung alongside paintings by Amelia Long, sorry about the siren. The artist Joseph Farrington was surely not the only visitor to Bromley Hill, who concluded that part of the scenery at Bromley Hill had something of the character of Gaspar Busan's landscapes, although Benjamin West differed, stating that, however agreeable in nature the scenes and colours they would not do in landscape painting. Little is known of Amelia's early training, although this copy of a print after Raphael made in around 1792, before her marriage to Charles, chose a skill she had already attained. Her formal training as an artist dates from around 1796, when she associated with the circle of watercolourists around Dr Thomas Monroe, which helps to explain both her approach to landscape and her interest in printmaking. In particular, she began taking lessons from Thomas Gertin, of whom she was reputedly the favourite pupil. An important aspect of Gertin's teaching was sketching out of doors, and sketches such as this one now in Dundee relate closely to the etchings in the Bromley Hill series. Gertin himself worked in the Bromley area around 1798 to 1800, and is believed to have visited Bromley Hill soon after the Longs acquired it. At any rate, the Longs also owned several watercolours by him, including the view of the Durham scene here, and helped fund his trip to Paris. As Susan Morris has discussed, Long was not the only talented female artist to study with Gertin, others being Julia Gordon and Elizabeth Levison Gower, Countess of Sutherland. I mentioned Elizabeth, who was related to Amelia by marriage, since, like Amelia, she privately published a set of etchings, in this case her 1807 views in Orkney. In all likelihood, both artists learnt to etch from Gertin, who had etched his own views of Paris, as will be discussed in a forthcoming talk in this same series. Amelia also studied with Henry Edridge, who became a lasting friend and companion, and who went on journeys with Amelia to the Y Valley and later the continent. Edridge was to portray both Amelia and Charles at Bromley Hill, with similar views towards London, seen behind them, and he is on record as falsely praising her work at least twice. Moving on to the etched views of Bromley Hill now, which you can see on the screen here in their entirety. The series comprises nine soft ground etchings on blue paper, touched with white highlights. This technique continued to be favoured by Long a decade later. In February 1818, the Charles Long had sent to Benjamin West a portfolio of 12 drawings, quote, executed with great stability, done on coloured paper to admit being touched upon with white, end quote. My research is based upon viewing two full sets of the prints, one at the British Museum and the other in the historic collections of Bromley libraries and heritage. Both are similarly trimmed, mounted and numbered, although there are differences such as whether prints have been initialed by hand and how they are coloured, which are often quite substantial between different impressions of the same print. At least one other complete copy exists in the Harris Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. A note on the technique here, soft ground etching was the reproductive technique that Gertin had favoured in his Paris views, and while laborious, it could be mastered by an artist who had not trained formally as a reproductive printmaker. Artists such as Gertin and JMW Turner often worked with professional printmakers to embellish the plates they had etched using aquatints or mezzotints, but Amelia instead and coloured her own plates, the effect that aquatint sought to reproduce in a commercial scale. The artist whose prints perhaps have the most in common with Long's views was another Monroe associate, François-Louis Tomas-Francia, whose drawing manual Studies of Landscape of 1810 reproduced drawings by Gainsborough, Gertin and other artists using that same technique that Long employed for her Bromley views at exactly the same time. The first plate in the series introduces it as a set for friends of the artist familiar with her home. You can see it here on the left of this slide with the inscription on the plinth of a plant nestled against a trellis. This plate knowingly plays against the expected fanfare of a title plate, indicating awareness of its audience. You can compare this with the role that the trellis plays in the other two images on this screen. It formed a narchway in the conservatory which, as shown by John Buckley's Watercolor and Amelia Long's own later lithograph, framed the view towards London. But in the title page, Amelia references this view through the detail of the trellis, but deliberately omits any view other than that of the plants that she, like her horticulturist mother, assiduously cultivated in Bromley. From this first plate on, the series takes in a single artfully concealed view of the house seen here, and then views of the prospects in all directions, togethered with positions more sheltered by trees. The latter have much in common with the watercolors and trees that were depicted by Amelia and visitors to Bromley, such as Edwidge and Peter DeWint. The set seems to evoke a walk through the grounds, taking in meadows, woods and waterways, in much the same way as another artistic tribute to Bromley Hill. George Cumberland's 1811 prose description of the property with its prefatory lines from Milton's Allegro. This is the frontispiece of the 1816 second edition, but it was first published in 1811. George Cumberland, himself a watercolourist as well as a writer, indicated the interrelation of prose and illustration in addressing his subject when with reference to Amelia's etchings, he wrote, without the aid of painting, not much will be accomplished. Whilst with a few chalk touches, we can work wonders as the masterly etchings of this very spot from an elegant mind and practice hand that I hope one day will be permitted to accompany these observations sufficiently prove, but Long's etchings never did accompany Cumberland's observations, both in the co-tree productions of the prints and the way that they were produced and coloured by Long herself, they could not escape from their original function and context. And it's worth noting here that while historically these prints have been marked as undated, as in the British Museum's cataloging, I've used Cumberland's reference to the prints in 1811 to note that this was the latest date that they would have been produced. The distant prospect of London could be seen from the Long's conservatory and terrace and featured in Edridge's portraits of the couple. This privileged view was the focus of one of the etchings in the series in which a cart traverses the middle ground, which is dotted with sheep, while St Paul's cathedral towers over the city and hills of Hampstead and Highgate looming behind. In Cumberland's description, the view from the terrace, quote, commands at times, St Paul's church, its dome and turret towers appearing ziff banded with white and beyond, extend the Highgate and Hampstead hill, forming a broad line of background, but that which renders the scene more remarkably interesting is that you see nothing of London except its spires, and the great church seems to arise like a vision from the edges of a wooded hill, end quote. It's hard to read this description in conjunction with the view and not think of Turner's lines of verse, which accompanied his own painting of London from Greenwich, exhibited in 1809 and soon after engraved for the Lieberstudium. Turner addresses London as a city concealed beneath a murky veil, and quote, save where thy spires pierced the doubtful air as gleams of hope amidst a world of care, end quote. So it's the same idea of London being illegible and invisible for a distance, except for the punctuation of its very grandest architecture. Amelia's etchings made for a cotary audience, as if an extension of the experience of visiting Bromley Hill itself could hardly be more different than the from the dry architectural studies of the house produced by John Buckler senior. There was territory in between these two opposites, however, in the form of additional lithographs that Amelia later made of Bromley Hill. And dated, but probably from the 1810s or 1820s, these lithographs were made in association with prominent printers, Ronnie and Forster, who printed lithographs by the likes of Francis Nicholson and Samuel Prout in two instances, and Charles Hall Mandel, thereby indicating a shift from the cotary privately printed setup of the earlier prints, which show no sign of commercial production. These two prints are more topographical and documentary, more composed, more intended to convey information to an audience not drawn from the artist's sentiments. As mentioned previously, Amelia was amongst the first generation of artists to adopt the new medium of lithography. Like soft ground etching, it could be taken up by artists without formal training in printmaking, and the texture of a lithograph too is somewhat similar to that for soft ground etching in conveying a sense of drawing. Francia, for instance, made the same shift from etching to lithography in his 1822 set of marine studies. View from the conservatory garden on the left here frames the view of London through the trellis, whether in the process of skewering St Paul's, and thereby directing attention to the foreground, including that trellis that Cumberland praised for its orange and lemon plants and rare climbers. The view of the terrace and conservatory room, meanwhile, addresses the architecture of the house far more directly than in the earlier set of etchings. A third lithograph is perhaps the most interesting, with its description, the vase in the conservatory room at Bromley Hill, brought from Rome by the Earl Brownlow, which is demonstrating in a disarmingly frank way the networks of patronage and friendship connecting the longs with the first Earl Brownlow, like Charles Long, another Tory politician. I've concentrated in this paper on Amelia's printmaking as a way of fostering artistic community among her friends and acquaintances, but she was also a regular honorary member of the Royal Academy between 1807 and 1822, when she was in the company of peers, such as Anne Dahmer and George Beaumont in the category of honorary exhibitor. Of her many RA exhibits, only four were identified as Bromley views, with many more identified as views elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It's not just that Amelia's art consisted solely of Bromley views, but rather considering the roles that Charles Long held and the number of academicians who regularly visited the property that she found a way in these prints of harmonising her living environment with the role it played in the cultural sphere. Indeed, the career of Amelia Long cuts across notions of professionalism and amateurism, demonstrating the work of an artist deeply embedded within the artistic discourse and exhibiting culture of the 19th century, while preserving a space for herself in dialogue primarily with a small circle and not beyond it. And this is related to the privilege of her upbringing. In the context of graphic landscape. Amelia's project of creating a self fashioned landscape, which in turn she made the focus of her own prints is a distinctive contribution to the development of the genre in the late Georgian period. Thank you. Thank you James sorry for the delays to engrossed in your paper and writing some notes. Thank you very much indeed for introducing us to a very different kind of graphic landscape and for introducing lithography into the mix which I'd love to talk to you a bit more about later on. First, can I ask the other two speakers to gather together or to put their screens on so we can maybe start by having a conversation amongst ourselves and then I've got the task which I've now realized is more difficult than than it seems to be. So I'm just starting through the questions and filtering the questions but please, members of the audience to keep posting your your questions, either for individual speakers or for the panel as whole. I wonder if I could start. Thanks again, all three of you for three fascinating papers which are the synergies between them in all kinds of surprising ways. I'd like to start by asking a question which I think is aimed firstly at john and James, because it's prompted by case paper but also by passing referencing john's paper and that's about the role of the picture risk, both as a word and a concept and as an aesthetic category, but also as a word with great currency in the publishing world, the popularity of collected picturesque views and series and so on. Each of you could say a few words about how the picturesque interacts with or informs or problematizes the images that you've been looking at. I noticed John for example picturesque appears in the subtitle, doesn't it, of what's his seeks of nobility and gentry. I think that it's used in a fairly kind of general way in the way that I think the picturesque is more commonly used, although so often scholars have recourse to Gilpin and Gilpin's vision of the picturesque. I always tend to think that that's a rather radio-syncratic notion in a way and one which was certainly not necessarily understood, I think, by all of his readers and one which certainly a number of artists actively reject. He often gets of course the complaint that when I go to look at these spots they don't look anything like your images, it's a common complaint made to Gilpin, and I think that it's what the kind of erases are those marks of individuality of the local specificness of a place that you might find in a portrait of a place. He specifically says in his writings that a portrait would not be picturesque. It's too like a map, he says. So I think it's a kind of a distinct notion of the picturesque, a more general notion of the picturesque that's been evoked by publications like Watts, for instance, than that one that we typically associate with Gilpin. And of course James mentioned Paine Nighting passing as well. So, you know, which is a further distinction of the picturesque. And there's of course that notable difference between the picturesque, the artist of the tourist, and maybe of the landowning as well. Thank you, John. James, if you've got any thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, nothing, nothing particularly. But I think I would say that it seems to me that it's the tradition that Emilio Long is, I think that whole tradition of, you know, the series of picturesque views and everything that John set out, you know, so brilliantly in his paper forms, you know, part of the inheritance of the significance that Emilio was was making and you can see that she is both working with that tradition and, you know, subverting it as well. And I think, yeah, I mean what stuck with me from from John's paper was the idea is about locality and, you know, kind of intimacy and, you know, how much knowledge of a place is evoked and represented within or not within print series. And I just wanted to, you know, mention a brilliant comment, which is, I noted in the chat from, from, I think, Moran Cross, who says, Emilio Long's career could be seen as a way of a woman exercising her own agency over land ownership and reflecting it through a female lens, even if she couldn't legally own it separately from her husband, she's still shaping her surroundings. I think that's really interesting. And so I think that, particularly in the prints that Emilio makes where she's kind of moving kind of deeper into the woodland and, you know, away from a distant view. I think she's, yeah, kind of subverting the inheritance of the picturesque. Well, one of the things that particularly fascinated me about James Paper, which I really loved, was that the way in which the estate landscape is being used to learn to draw, which has a kind of really long and interesting history back into the 17th century. And you can think of people like Tillamans teaching Byron at his estate, or John Evelyn making studies back in the 17th century. In which the estate landscape is being used to learn to draw. It's the obvious things that drawing masters use. But I think it's also a kind of way of getting to know your place in the world. Know your landscape, understand it. Sometimes those drawings will pay attention to the kind of duties of land ownership as well. There's a fascinating tradition within the kind of larger category of the state views. The Amelia's long, long too. Thank you, John. Yeah, that's really interesting. Kate. I just want to say I thought actually listening having John's paper and James's paper in the same panel, I thought actually kind of really transformed the way I was thinking about the state portraiture. There were so many points of kind of comparison and contrast. And I think there were really interesting issues about gender really interesting issues about land ownership, and the very different relationship of these various artists with the land whether they're owning it, whether they've given permission for the views to be taken or whether they haven't remotely given permission for the views to be taken. There were really interesting kind of issues around space and whether we're near the house or in the pleasure gardens or the park land or the wider estate and looking at how that kind of is affected by these very different contexts that you're dealing with. But the other thing that really struck me was John's point about time, which, you know, I've thought about estate portraiture in terms of space and the different views and perspectives but actually that point about a different time as well was really interesting. I wondered actually whether James, whether you sort of looked at that in those views by Amelia, whether there's a sense of kind of times of day, times of year? Yeah, that's a really good point. Short answer. No, not really. But I think that you certainly do get, you know, a sense of the seasons and, you know, there are views where you have kind of these great shafts of light kind of coming through. Yeah, I mean, I think I was also, because there's so much is not known about when these prints were made precisely and at what point they were in, you know, working on the landscape and whether the prints were made, you know, within the space of a few weeks or months or over the course of years, I think that that also lends this aspect of the unknown in terms of duration, as opposed to commercially published prints which tend to be much more specific whether they're produced, you know, in parts and published in increments. So, yeah, it makes it more difficult to know about that question. I remember being asked once when I did talk about a state portrait, someone asking the question is it always sunny in these pictures, which of course it tends to be largely because of course, you know, it's the seasonality of, you know, a landed lifestyle, which means that these pictures, you know, do tend to depict a certain moment in the seasons of course when you were when visitors when you're visiting and they're staying at the estate. And so it's quite always interesting to me when you see instances of images where it's clear almost out of season, or when they begin to introduce kind of inclement weather. There's a great painting of Cocked Hall by George Lambert from the 1740s, which is the first one I know, where you suddenly see weather in an estate view. So I'm always really interested in those instances, which does, as Kate says, introduce this kind of element of particular seasonality to them as well. I'd be interested to know as well if if Long's views are related to particular changes in the landscape, whether there's a landscaping project in happening at that time or, you know, sort of recently, or indeed if there was changes about to take place, which is the other way in which there's instance in which those views are often made. They record a landscape of that past. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's definitely something I'd like to look into more. I was just looking back over the print and I think that it is pretty sunny and all of them. Yeah, I was also struck listening to your paper, John, about just how much narrative incident there is in so many of these series because the figures in Amelia Long's, I mean, they do actually kind of belong more to the picturesque tradition of, you know, you know, Staffidge and, you know, pretty women and, you know, you know, like a cart traversing the landscape but you had so many great examples of where from one plate to the next in a series there actually is really this kind of narrative that can be extrapolated around comings and goings and, you know, things happening in sequence. And yeah, and I have to hear any more that you had to say about that. I was really struck by by how in different ways each of your papers showed how the graphic landscapes that you were looking at could become embroiled in narratives that reach beyond their immediate subject whether that's john you talked about the prince in a way of telling as well as a way of showing and having a potential biographical element relating to the place as well as to the to the patrons and Katie very eloquently talked about the complex intertextual stories that could be read across between images on the wall. Yeah, if anyone's got any further comments about that before we move on to some of the audiences questions. I think one of the fascinating things I found working on on print rooms is the fact that I come to Prince from print room displays. So I start with the rooms and what's on the walls and then I start researching the Prince. And what's interesting is often these very you know it then really hits me the very different context in which the Prince can work. But also I discover I'm kind of finding out almost more about the Prince from thinking about how they're working in the print room. So I've also been doing some work on Piranesi and I feel like I understand Piranesi Prince almost more from thinking about how they're used in print rooms and certain aspects of Farrington's views I think I wouldn't really have, you know, kind of got to without thinking about how they work or don't work in that display. Thank you. I'm going to move to some of the questions from the audience because there's a lot to get to. And just apologies in advance to those of you who don't hear their questions there today we will make sure that your questions are passed on to all of the speakers, in I think they want to think about it and respond individually but I think we've got 15 or 20 minutes to, to at least tackle a good number of them. And I'm going to start with a really personal question from Nick Grindel. Nick says it would be good to say something about the politics of walking since most of these series take the viewer on a walk around the property. But if you've got any thoughts in response to next question about moving through into and through the landscape on foot. There's a couple of either end of my kind of chronology in my talk of course you had the Arendall's and I think it is meant to be the Arendall family, strolling the bounds of their property and it's interesting in that one set of prints you can actually see them walking and trace them walking across the very boundary of their property. The other end is the Hafford John Warwick Smith ones, which are really interesting because the view there seems fixed on the ground as much as it does on the view out. It's a view, sometimes where you have these expansive views suddenly change to darkened views where it's focused on the nooks and crannies of the landscape. So I think what's happening in a way is it's a kind of element of concealment and surprise as you move through the landscape, which I thought was actually also a feature maybe of the lung views as well. Which replicates of course the experience of the landscaping style as well that's being favoured as well. And one of the things I didn't have chance to talk about in my paper really was the relationship of those views to the physical landscaping of the grounds as well. In other instances, it's not just about kind of walking, but of course those Brownian landscapes are very much about moving fast through the landscape through, you know, in carriages or on horseback, their landscapes, you know, which in the quote that I used at the beginning that create a series of moving pictures through the landscape constantly, where the landscape to constantly flux and the serial image, I think is one of the few ways which artists have to kind of try to deal with that sense of a moving landscape, which I think he's meant in a kind of emotive sense as well as a kind of physical movement. Yeah, just to add to that on the lungs, as I mentioned, very much this narrative quality and I suppose whereas the prince that John and Kate were referring to, were often accompanied by a letterpress, which would, you know, provide that context for the image in relation to the state or the landscape. You don't get that with the long prints, but you do have this account by Cumberland, which is written and published quite soon after, in which she explicitly references the etchings and envisaging his account being published alongside them. And when you read the account, you know, in tandem with the etchings, you can see that Cumberland himself might actually be taking his cue from the drawings, the etchings in kind of making his itinerary of the property. Yeah, I think the written account is very much informed by the route that Amelia was taking with her etchings, which, you know, I imagine was informed by the perambulations that she would take with her, her visitors with, with Edridge and with with the winters as they moved through and isolated the most kind of visually arresting aspects of the landscape. Thank you, James. Kate, have you got any further thoughts? Not specifically only that I was thinking of them of all those images where you get the phatons kind of trotting around the landscape and I was thinking about how important the sort of you know the phaton is as a way of kind of getting across those swathes of grass and yes, and that brings in speed as well as time and space into the various ways in which those series are working. I'm going to move to a different question, a really interesting, I presume a kind of conservation led question from James Clifton, which is addressed principally to Kate, but I think we could extend the question to think about the longevity of the Prince that you're talking about more generally beyond before they become archival objects to be rediscovered by art historians and James says thanks Kate for a fabulous talk given the practice of exhibiting prints on walls was there any comment, whether at the vine or elsewhere from the very beginning of the practice about how long such prints should remain exposed before their wretched state made them unattractive and counter decorative as it were. I think I imagine everyone was struck by seeing some of the prints that you showed being stained and discoloured. So was that a consideration that was taken into account at the time? Yeah, I mean it's always, it's a tricky thing when working on print rooms and I know I think Esther Chadwick's out there somewhere and she of course did a wonderful piece on the print room at Petworth and she'll know this too that you kind of you get used to seeing these spaces with brown prints against whatever colour the wall is and you have to kind of really work your brain to try and think what they would have looked like originally. There doesn't seem to be any discussion about sort of the potential longevity of these schemes when when they're created. And one of the issues is that so many of them get taken down in the early to mid 19th century so there were many, many, many more print rooms than survived today. The ones that have made it seem to have made it for quite idiosyncratic reasons. One of the main reasons that I keep coming across is benign neglect. One of them trying to find out why a print room has survived. It's because the house went through a period of benign neglect and in the early to mid 19th century and print room made it and then was interesting enough to keep. Apart from the ones created by the first Duke of Wellington at Stratfield say, which I think were treated with great reverence by all of all of his descendants for very obvious reasons. I think it's just really interesting because Kate spoke so well about the number of transformations that these prints go through from being taken out of one context and being put into another. And one of the other transformations is that's a value and you kind of you posted, you know, kind of like horror of, you know, finding in some cases, you know, rather valuable prints being put up on the wall and so there is a sort of flattening that happens between prints, you know, produced, you know, with different in different quantities and with different values which kind of gets leveled out somewhat when they're putting to the print room context. Yeah, and I think also I mean going around country houses today. And these places, you know, have portfolios and portfolios of prints and prints shoved between boards and often very little sense of what's there and kind of real gems mixed up amongst complete child and you know it's it's and I think in some ways. One of the problems with these this material in these collections is the sheer quantity. There's not much stuff and it you know so it's often not cataloged you know it's and the sort of you know the really important and telling is mixed up amongst the much less significant. Thanks and leading on from that discussion question from Tony Rutherford who Tony says wonderful papers thank you all. I wanted to say john mentioned the phrase copying not invention and James discusses techniques that could be used without the traditional skill and Kate mentions the signatures being framed over Tony was wondering how are the skills of the printmakers viewed or valued. You don't have any thoughts about that I missed something you talked about john. I think it's a great person in relation to William Wollett and others. Yes, well, I mean it's it's Wollett's name, for instance, that, that sells so many prints in the 1760s, rather than necessarily the artists whose work he's kind of engraving. There are instances later, you know that one of the points I tried to make about what's later series, for instance, is he begins by trying to sell his series on the backs of these being images after name art major figures like Sammy initially George Barrett who is now a quite obscure figure but was a huge player in the 1760s at least. But what you know very very quickly degenerates being into this world where you're relying on younger artists whether that's for reasons of financial reasons I suspect often there's not. And then eventually the names of who's you know producing these works, or the producing the original design just disappear from the plates entirely. So it becomes almost a kind of different enterprises it's during the course of its life. It begins with certain pretensions I suppose to cultural status, but then kind of degenerate becomes something why that they're appealing almost to a different kind of market. So it doesn't really answer the questions as such but I think hopefully it's related. Yeah, thank you. Kate. Oh, sorry, I think was that because I was unmuted. Do you have any thoughts about about the extent to which ways in which long as a printmaker was valued as an artist status. I mean what I was thinking about this then was just, and just musing on the different print media that have been spoken about today. Yeah, I don't know what you think, John and Kate, but it was just kind of interesting to think about whether the transition from different technologies from copper engraving which really is kind of an artisanal skill which you know requires many years of apprenticeship for a William Woolitt or the equivalent to the soft ground etchings and lithographs that I looked at. In which case, you know, you would need to work with a printer but you could produce a lithograph or a soft ground etching without those many years of apprenticeship. Yeah, I'm just kind of wondering how they've, how much that is to do with transforming, you know, this, this, this form of print as a genre and an offer and as well, the collaborations that I refer to with artists such as Gertin and Turner where one person would etch an outline someone else would add mezzotins or aquatins and so you have these different forms of collaboration. Yeah, I don't have anything else to say to that. Well, I wondered if you might, James might say something actually about the use of, which I know you were interested in Richard about lithographs, which of course you know has kind of connotations of mass production. So it's kind of interesting that Long is interested in that as a medium or very small productions. Yeah, I mean it seems that the, yeah, she that even these views of continents where you're up appear to have been only producing very small quantities but I suppose that's that's in the nature of lithography that it has this variability and whether I mean there is very much in the early days of lithography kind of a thriving kind of kind of take up of the medium amongst amateurs but because a lithographic stone doesn't wear away in the same way that's a kind of a copper plate does that it does have this, you know, sort of very large reproducibility factor. But I think it's just very interesting that Amelia was was so quick to take up this new form, you know, when there have been very few large scale series of lithographs in Britain by the 1810s I think, I think, you know, she was just very very early with that. So I think it was still I think it was still finding its form whereas you know you fast forward to the 1840s and it becomes the dominant form for this genre of print. Yeah, she was just very quick. Thank you James. Yeah, I was I'm glad you raised that John. I agree in my mind at least when you mentioned is lithography suggests a more kind of commercial deliberately commercial enterprise. That's really interesting. I'm going to move to a different question we've got plenty of others I'm afraid we're not going to be able to get through them all but Morag cross raises a question principally for Kate but again I think interesting for all of us to think about about the ideal height at which different prints are designed to be viewed and Morag asks were some series of prints designed specifically for print rooms with eye level viewpoints or low level viewpoints in mind, i.e. were they specifically designed to be placed on a specific part of the wall near the top of the wall near the bottom and so on. Yeah, it's a really interesting question I mean I think the short answer is I don't think prints were actually designed specifically for print rooms I think it's more. I mean my sense of the moment I'm spending time in the poor melon Center library going through their copies of print publishers catalogs. And the thing that keeps striking me again and again is the fact that publishers want their prints to be used for as many different purposes as possible they just. In other ways they can expand the market for prints the better. So I think the ideal is sort of adaptability and flexibility so they can be used in print rooms or used in a myriad of other other contexts. I mean for me what's interesting is where things are used. And you know the sort of the logics of creating a display like that so you know it that people do tend to put sort of quite visually striking larger compositions towards the top and more detailed images down below so you see. So I think it's really important material and using it within that context but they're having to kind of work with material that's, you know, published in a much wider, wider print, print market. Thank you john and take do you have any thoughts about the, I guess the conditions of viewing of the prince that you're looking at and Amelia longs images employer fairly intimate kind of looking but maybe that's not an assumption. I mean, as I say the two sets that I viewed both presented in the same way that is trimmed and mounted with the plate numbers, kind of inscribed in the top right corner so I think that they were probably bound or they were just viewed individually within a portfolio. Yeah, that's what I have to say about those ones. I would say say something similar I suppose about the prince I was mainly concerned with. There's a, I think there's a question in the Q&A about which was mainly directed at Kate about the way in which maybe these print rooms for instance and particularly the inclusion of landscapes related to the outer outside of the house as well. So I think that I've, I've thought about more in terms of painted views of the state rather than printed views. But there are certainly occasions for certain examples like that come readily to mind, where I think, you know, just, you know, the landscape in its painted form can be, you know, is visible needs physical form through the window outside. There's a clear relationship being meant to be implied that about the ideal vision of that landscape maybe on the wall and the physical world outside. And certainly in the late 17th century, you're having writers advising on how to lay out your house where those kinds of relationships are being encouraged. Particularly bearing in mind, of course, the new kind of windows that are available in those kinds of views possible. But the other kind of interesting viewing issue in relationships to some of the prints that I'm interested in, particularly earlier in the century, are ones that are purpose made for to be seen through viewing devices, famously things like the zograscope, you know, which are meant to enhance the three-dimensionality of prints that you can occupy the space. Great. Thank you, John. Regretfully, I think we're coming towards the end of our allotted time. Right, that'd be great to spend another half an hour exploring the connections between your papers in more detail. But before I say a final thank you to you, I just want to give a reminder of the next event in this series, which takes place on Tuesday next week, on the night of November, under the theme of revisiting the canon where Cora Gilroy where we'll introduce three new speakers, Greg Smith, Timothy Wilcox and Jillian Forrester. And Jillian, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to address your questions today. But I look forward to hearing what you have to say next week. It just leaves me to say thank you very much again to our three speakers today. We can't hear the applause, but I can certainly see from the questions and the comments that there's a large and very appreciative audience out there. And to the audience, thank you for coming and for contributing to a fascinating discussion, which clearly is going to be an ongoing one. So have a great day and see you next time.