 Hello, I'm Martin Possil. Welcome to the second talk in the public lecture series for Summer of 2020. Variations on a Theme, The White Monk by Richard Wilson. Variations on a Theme is my chosen title because, unlike other masterpieces of the British school, such as The Hayway by John Constable and Fighting Timber Air by JMW Turner, there isn't one definitive white monk, but quite a number of different compositions with variations. The version of the painting now in Houston, Texas, that I'm showing here, is one of the most accomplished, I think. We don't know exactly when it was painted, probably sometime in the mid to early 1760s. We do know that shortly after it was made, it was displayed in a country house in Norfolk, Langley Park, which belonging to the Beecham Proctor family. In the late 18th century, it hung as a centerpiece in the dining room, flanked by landscape paintings by Prusa, Claude Lorraine and Canaletto, or collected on the Grand Tour. Wilson's composition has intrigued me for a number of years and for a number of reasons. Its enigmatic subject matter, its dramatic setting, and above all, its evocative title. White monks abound. There is, as we've just seen, a white monk in Houston. There are others scattered across Britain, Europe, the USA and Canada, each one having a claim to have been painted by Wilson alone or in collaboration with members of his workshop. There's a white monk by Wilson's talented pupil, William Hodges, another by Joseph Wright of Derby, a distinguished landscape painter in his own right, as well as others by professional copyists and later followers. Wilson himself referred to such popular compositions with strong commercial appeal as good breeders. Sounds a bit like rabbits. So why was the white monk in particular such a good breeder? Wilson was born in Penergois, Wales, in 1714. He was the son of a clergyman. By the 1740s, he was established in London as a professional portrait painter, but he was by then also branching out into landscape, as we can see in this painting, a Westminster Bridge in the Manor of Canaletto. A few years later, in the spring of 1750, Wilson travelled to Italy in what appears to have been a deliberate attempt to make a fresh start and explore new horizons, quite literally. We now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that this man was a watershed in his career and also in the trajectory of British landscape painting. In Italy, Wilson travelled first to Venice, where he encountered the celebrated Italian landscape painter Francesco Zuccarelli. Zuccarelli encouraged him in his ambitions to embrace landscape, and there, in return for a landscape by Zuccarelli, Wilson painted his portrait, now in Tate's collection. It was to be among Wilson's last portraits. From Venice, Wilson travelled to Rome, the epicentre of European high art and culture by Panini, depicting a gallery of views of Rome, featuring paintings and sculpture being admired and studied by artists and connoisseurs. One important point to bear in mind is that Wilson was well educated and well connected socially, enjoying the company of wealthy young aristocrats undertaking the Grand Tour. We can therefore think of his seven-year Italian sojourn as something of a Grand Tour in its own right. Soon, Wilson was introduced to the leading movers and shakers in the Roman artistic community, notably the influential German academic painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Mengs's admiration for Wilson was signalled by the portrait he painted of him, again in exchange for one of his landscapes. Significantly, Wilson is portrayed in the guise of a landscape painter. Note the Italian landscape on his easel to the right. In his richly brocaded gown and turban, he looks every inch the sophisticated European gentleman artist. Wilson was also encouraged by the French master Claude Joseph Vernais, then among the most celebrated landscape painters in Italy, working in the manner of great 17th century masters of classical landscape, Claude Lorraine and Gaspar Dugay. Wilson developed strong links with artists associated with the French Academy in Rome, acting as a kind of focal point for landscapes drawn from countries across Europe. It was in Rome too that Wilson first conceived and painted his grand mythological landscape, the destruction of the children of Nairobi. The picture that secured his reputation as a history painter, as well as a landscapeist, when he exhibited it in London in 1760 following his return from Italy. Early on during his time in Italy, Wilson signalled his independence as a painter via this pair of landscapes, purchased by the Irish aristocrat Ralph Howard. The views are of Tivoli and its surrounding countryside, well-trodden terrain on the Grand Tour itinerary. However, unlike the classical painters of the 17th century, or indeed Vernais, Wilson did not provide a general idealised evocation of Tivoli, but a site-specific view which accurately depicted the landscape and local climatic conditions. Notably, Wilson inserted the physical presence of the artist, placing himself within the narrative. In the picture on the left, he is clearly painting outdoors on plein air, directly from nature. This was then a radical departure from convention. He also painted on commission other site-specific paintings, such as this one, the Rome from the Villa Madama. Throughout this time, he travelled tirelessly around Rome and its environs, from the lakes at Albano and Namie, to the towns of Gensano and Aritio. Wilson relished historic sites of ancient Rome, notably the Villa of Mycenaeus at Tivoli, shown here in this painting of 1756-7. On one occasion, Wilson visited Tivoli with a party of young British aristocrats, sneaking with them under the shade of a tree, while at the same time providing art tuition. This imposing picture, now in the collection of the Tate, was commissioned by one of them as a souvenir of his time in Italy, and an expression of his sophisticated taste for contemporary art. As remarkable as Wilson's rapid transformation into an accomplished painter of classical landscapes, was his personal response to Italy. Italy was a treasure house of art and culture, a land of great natural beauty, but it was also a country beset by poverty and deprivation. Here, in a drawing later transformed into a painting, he observes how a ruined fragment of Hadrian's villa now serves as a peasant's hovel, a line of washing suspended above a stone arch, which itself provides a humble shelter. Wilson was a great draftsman and a master of light and shade. Even around Rome and further afield, he made a very personal record of his experience through his drawings. To be earl of Dartmouth alone, he made no less than sixty-eight finally executed presentation drawings, including this one of the Via Nomentana, the road which led north-east from Rome to Nomentum, now the town of Mentana. And here I'm showing you a detail from the centre-right foreground depicting a group of travellers just a couple of inches under just extraordinary kind of control and line and tone that Wilson has. Wilson journeyed south to Naples to Lake Avernus to Bayer and to the island of Ischia as witnessed by this exquisite small oil painting now in the Tate, which captures the transience of clouds scutting across an evening sky. In Roman times, Ischia was celebrated for its thermal springs and was a popular holiday resort for the wealthy elite. Now, it was a sleepy outcrop inhabited by fishermen. Like Turner, several generations later, Wilson acknowledged the glorious past of the location, visualising it as a landscape of memory. Following in Wilson's footsteps in Italy, time and again one is reminded that what Wilson recorded in his drawings and paintings was faithful to the location, as for example here at Lake Avernus, which I visited a few years ago. Before Wilson, artists captured in drawings and sketches views and locations based on first-hand experience. However, finished landscape compositions were either highly generalized or strictly topographical. What Wilson did, and this was quite new, was to combine the real with the ideal, a past with the present, a particular with the general. With these considerations in mind, let's now take a closer look at the white monk. The narrative of the white monk, unlike standard classical landscapes, is not taken from literature or mythology. It's Wilson's own invention. We don't know whether Wilson himself referred to the composition by the title of the white monk, nor do we know whether he ever exhibited it in public, or indeed exactly when he first conceived of the composition. However, we do have some facts to hand. The first evidence of the existence of the composition was this engraving of 1765, released by London's leading print publisher, John Boydell, who'd already published engravings after other major works by Wilson. The engraving was made by James Roberts, the elder, and is inscribed at the bottom, engraved from the original picture made by Mr Richard Wilson. Frustratingly, no title or owner's name is appended. At the same time, Roberts engraved what appears to be a pendant or companion print of the same dimensions, and it's entitled A View in Italy. It was based on a composition known generally as Lake Avernus. In the foreground are two fishing and the figure of a monk who appears to be preaching to them. Another coupling in one image of sacred secular culture. What we do know is that the original picture of a white monk from which Roberts's engraving isn't derived belonged to a British aristocrat, Francis Edgerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. In 1754, as a young man, Edgerton had lived and travelled to Italy. There he went on a pictorial spending spree, acquiring paintings by Verne, Names, and Wilson, among others. His Wilson acquisitions included a version of the destruction of the children of Nairobi and Phaeton. It's more than likely that he also acquired at this time his version of the white monk. If so, it may have been the first version of the composition. And so, like Nairobi, the white monk was quite probably conceived in Italy, inspired by direct experience of the Italian countryside, its history, its customs, and its people. In 1825, Captain Thomas Hastings, an amateur painter and engraver, published a volume of prints after paintings by Wilson, with a less-than-flattering portrait of Wilson on the cover. It included a modest etching, which he entitled the White Monk. Now, as far as we know, this is the first time that this title had appeared in print. This picture, I apprehend, wrote Hastings in the accompanying text, derived its appellation from the circumstance of a monk in white, preying at the foot of a cross. As Hastings noted, his engraving was made from one of two versions of the subject, then belonging to Lady Marianne Ford. Lady Ford owned the largest collection of works by Wilson in private hands, inherited from her father, Benjamin Booth, a personal friend of Wilson. Perhaps, therefore, the white monk appellation may have originated with Booth or with Wilson himself. Although there are compositional variations in the numerous versions of the white monk, the principal gradients are very much the same. Two women, or at times a pair of lovers, are seated in the right foreground. A man standing nearby, sometimes with a parasol, sometimes not. A figure on horseback descending to a river valley. Two monks on a rocky promontory by a wayside cross, sometimes a chapel. A cascade at the extreme left. A large boulder in the left foreground. An architectural structure in the middle distance, leading to a mountainous horizon. A fundamental question centres on the overall meaning of Wilson's narrative and its intended audience. As we know from the patterns of past ownership, the white monk clearly appealed to those who had a personal knowledge of Italy to cherish the experience of a grand tour. The white monk clearly held an appeal to aristocratic tastes. Even it has been asserted, bolstering the British aristocrats' self-worth and confirming their superior cultural and political status within an established hierarchy. For the Wilson scholar David Salkin, the white monk is an emblematic landscape encapsulating a philosophical concept, a so-called concordia discourse, or harmonious discord, where conflicts between the elements paradoxically result in harmony. In the white monk, the concordia discourse is expressed by the formal symmetry imposed by Wilson as the chaotic multiplicity of nature has yielded to the ordering hand of art. Thus, the inclusion of the monks on the promontory signals a reassuring image of a world anchored in a divinely ordained harmony which was in turn reinforced by the moral authority of the patrician class who reveal their innate breeding in commercial investment in Wilson's painting. It's also possible, I think, to consider another interpretation of Wilson's painting, one that is grounded in the chosen iconography, Wilson's abiding sense of place, the vibrant and times-unsettling culture that he encountered in Italy, a landscape which appeared at once reassuring and alluring, but also disturbing and at times somewhat sinister. With regard to location, Andrew Wilton, a scholar who has made a particular study of British landscape artists in Italy, suggests that the white monk might be, I quote, a composite view incorporating memories of a gorge at Tivoli. As Wilton remarks, the rendition of nature has a feeling of authenticity. I would agree, for it seems clear that the specific source of inspiration for Wilson's landscape is the countryside flanking the river Anyene, a tributary of the Tiber. As we can see here, traced in a map, the Anyene rises from springs in the Simbuini Mountains around Trevi-Nelatia, flowing past the towns of Subiaco and Vicovaro before descending the gorge at Tivoli, wending its way through the Campania towards Rome. The cascade to the left of the white monk is reminiscent of the falls at Tivoli, although there are just many such cascades which are bound in this dramatic landscape, including the one I'm showing here. The Anyene was steeped in history. In classical times, the two-facious limestone, the Tufa Lianato, which shapes the contours of the hills and gorges, was an important source of building material in ancient Rome. It was covered with indentations and covered with lichen. It also had immense pictorial appeal. Mighty aqueducts supplied Rome with water from artificial lakes, formed by the Emperor Nero at Subiaco. And although they'd fallen into disuse by the medieval period, their vestigial yet still powerful presence, strung out across the landscape, is indicated in the mid-ground of Wilson's composition. A reminder of Rome's faded glory and a reaffirmation of a sense of time and place. Looking further at specific locations, it would seem that Wilson's promontory to the left of the white monk may well have been inspired by the dramatic cliff-top setting of San Cosimato at Vicovaro, while the vista at the right looks east towards the Simboni Mountains. Here we can compare a detail from Joseph Wright's painting of the convent of San Cosimato with a detail from Wilson's white monk. Topographically and culturally, they have a great deal in common. In this region, other important Benedictine monasteries perched upon rocky outcrops of Mentorella, Guadagnolo and Subiaco. I think therefore we can affirm that the terrain in the white monk takes its inspiration from the valley and the mountains that flank the Aniene. But can we be more specific about the reasons that lay behind the choice of location? And can they assist us in helping to understand further the iconography and meaning of the picture? The unnerving presence of the monks, albeit remote, may provide a keen. In the early 6th century, Benedict of Nursia, Saint Benedict, roamed travelling along the Aniene to Subiaco in the Simboni Mountains where he spent three years of self-imposed solitude in a cave. Upon his re-emergence, Benedict journeyed back down the Aniene to Vicovaro where he sojourned at the invitation of the mastic community. Things did not go well. The monks tried to poison Benedict's brend wine as he was thought to be too strict in his insistence on austerity and abstinence. Yet it was from these troubled beginnings that a string of 12 Benedictine monasteries was established along the Aniene, which eventually formed part of the Via Benedicti. The Benedictine Way. The Rulicent Benedict was uncompromising, prescribing obedience, humility and penitence. Benedict led by example, meeting out penitential self-punishment as we see here in Signorelli's fresco. On one occasion, Benedict is reported to have quelled his bodily desires by stripping off and rolling in nettles and thorn bushes. If we accept that Wilson's composition is situated quite specifically in the Aniene valley, then it would appear that the two monks on the promontory are intended to evoke the historic and continued existence in the hills of the flagellant monastic community. Let's now take a closer look at Wilson's monks perched on the promontory before a stark wooden cross. The attitudes of the figures, one leaning over the other, suggests some form of mortification of the flesh relating to the act of penance through flagellation, a commonplace in a number of confraternities. The monk in grey meets out punishment to the crouching figure in white. Even so, Wilson's tiny figures, little more than dashes of pigment, do not in themselves explain entirely the meaning of the composition. In order to do this, we need to cast our netroller wider. From the evidence of other pictures made by Wilson in Italy and inspired by his time there, it's clear that he had an abiding interest in monastic subjects. On his arrival in Rome in 1752, he painted this character study of a Capuchin monk, a subject depicted by 17th century old masters, including Rubens and Rembrandt. A few years later, around 1756 to 7, Wilson painted a view of Lake Naini and Genzano from the terrace of the Capuchin monastery, bringing in the foreground a monk receiving charity from a visiting woman. On his return to England, or possibly earlier, Wilson painted this picture featuring Capuchin monks in a shady retreat which was later engraved with the title Solitude and inscribed with lines from James Thompson's poem The Seasons. In the foreground to the left, a wayfaring monk stands with a staff before a seated monk who reads in a clay before a chapel. A group of monks perform the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. Fascinatingly, recent X-ray photography has revealed that beneath the painting is a very different composition consisting of a group of mints bathing, quite possibly a representation of the story told by Ovid of Diana and Actaeon. It may also be of significance in the present context that Wilson has chosen to overlay his essay in the profane with sacred subject matter. Although their power and influence was reduced, monastic communities still formed a significant social grouping in parts of 18th century Europe and provided a curious and at times fascinating presence for British travellers. Their dress code lay beyond the boundaries of fashion or taste, and their long flowing robes were a reminder of a bygone age. By this time however, many communities, notably convoys, had lost any vestige of the sacred, nuns in particular being regarded as particularly promiscuous, while mendicant monks were looked on as little more than licensed beggars. The product of a resolutely protestant culture, many British people regarded Roman Catholic ritual with suspicion as we can see in this detail from Hogarth's celebrated painting The Roast Beef of Old England, where an overfed monk fingers a piece of prime British red meat, while glimpsed through the city gate at Calais, abject French citizens prostrate themselves before a religious procession. At this time too, London's brothels were often referred to satirically as convents, where prostitutes were paraded as nuns, and procuruses were self-styled abbesses. The nuns and monks were also popular characters adopted by the well-to-do-it fashionable metropolitan masquerades. No one relished satirizing the monastic fraternity more than Sir Francis Dashwood, ringleader of the notorious monks of Medmenham Abbey at West Wickham, known officially to members as the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wickham, more popularly known as the Hellfire Club. During his grand tour Dashwood, under cover in a dark and sistine chapel, actually took a horse whip to a group of devout flagellants who thought they were being attacked by the devil. Here he is featured by Hogarth, parodying Catholic images of St Francis of Assisi through a quite shocking conflation of sex and religion. It was of course such temptation that those who took monastic vows were duty-bound to resist rather than indulge, which brings us back to the presence and the behaviour of the monks in Wilson's painting. On the far side of the bell, remote and detached, the monks practice penitential discipline as a means of quelling desire and thoughts relating to the pleasures of the flesh. On the near side, a mounted rider descends towards the river while two loosely clad peasant women lounge suggestively on a grassy bank. The seltry atmosphere is underscored by the threat of storm clouds and the hovering presence of the young man holding the parasol, ostensibly to shade him from the sun, but also suggestive of his role as a woody lover. The women represent the spirit of dolce faniente, sensual, carefree idleness and a potential source of temptation to monks and grand tourists alike. The carefully orchestrated juxtaposition of the remotely positioned monks and the nearby women is, to me at least, crucial to the meaning and interpretation of the white monk. Wilson's subtly conceived composition, which transcends mere satire, offers a place-specific meditation on the contrasting fears, constrained virtue and hedonistic pleasure. For those British Malori who had visited Italy and perhaps tasted forbidden fruits, this was an evocative image. We're calling the heady cocktail of sacred and profane, which formed an underlying light motif of the culture which fueled the grand tour experience. It also helps to explain why Wilson was encouraged to return to the composition time and time again.