 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Cora Gilroy-Ware. I'd like to welcome you all and thank Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone for the invitation. I'm delighted to be a part of this fascinating conference and delighted to introduce today's three wonderful papers. So you can read bios for each of our speakers online, so for time's sake I'm not going to read them today. But I'm going to dive instead right into my opening remarks. Before I do so, however, there are just a few housekeeping points to make. So the session is going to contain three 20-minute papers followed by a panel discussion in Q&A. After the second paper, there'll be a short 10-minute comfort break. Audience members can type questions using the Q&A function. I'm sure we're all familiar with that now. And the session will be recorded and made available to the public. The post captioning is available, so just press the CC button on the bottom right of the screen and select show subtitle. So that's it for housekeeping. And I'm going to get started now. All right, so in 1804, Thomas Holcroft's travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland, and the Netherlands to Paris was published in London. Successful in exploiting the popularity of the travel log among English readers at the time, Holcroft's lengthy two-volume text details as the title suggests the author's experiences and observations while visiting various sites in Western Europe. The journey was made during the brief period of peace between Britain and France that occurred from March 1802 to May 1803. As Greg will discuss in his paper today, Holcroft's account also provides behind-the-scenes insight into the genesis of a series of aquitants after etchings by the watercolourist and printmaker Thomas Gertin. This body of work is known as Gertin's picturesque views in Paris and you'll be hearing lots more about it from Greg in due course. Gertin was one of many British artists who crossed the channel during the peace. His inability to speak French and his poor health, so he actually died before the peace came to an end, meant that Gertin needed accompanying on trips to sketchable places. Holcroft's role as Gertin's guide is narrated in the 1804 publication. Halfway through the second volume, Holcroft describes the artist's dissatisfaction with the design of Versailles. After dinner we proceeded to Versailles where Gertin hoped to find full and delightful employment for his pencil. Never was disappointment more complete. Regular forms, parallelograms, squares, octagons, circles and everything that lion and compass could accomplish had been assembled with never-ceasing labour. The town, the streets, the palace, the gardens are all in this style. A treatise on geometry would be as good a book of landscape as Versailles can afford. Holcroft concludes the section on Versailles by stating plainly, we left it with something like content. Holcroft's account of Gertin's response is typical. As I'm sure many of our audience members are aware or have encountered in different contexts and other time periods, accusations of artifice on the part of French artists and designers are common in British artistic discourse. During the period of peace in 1802 and 1803, such judgments abound in travel writing. While for Gertin it was the geometric rigidity of 17th century landscape architecture at Versailles that provoked this reaction. For other British artists it was French academic painting. Also in Paris during the peace, the landscape painter Joseph Farrington uses the adjective French in his diary to imply a cold, stilted, unnatural mode of representation, a mode of representation that he perceives in the work of his Paris-based contemporaries. Fast forward to 1915 and the alignment of artistic style with national identity and even blood operates as the cornerstone of the history of art as an emergent academic discipline. Influenced however indirectly by both racial science and notions of art for art's sake, the German formalist Heinrich Wolfland declared that the painter paints with his blood. The style of the individual is kept in check by the style of the school, the country, the race. At the very least, every artistic conception is by its very nature organised according to certain notions of place. Yet, as will be explored by Tim in his paper on John Salcottman's series of etchings published in 1822 under the title Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, style is in fact borderless. Like prints, style travels as people travel, as coaches and ships make their way across land and sea. Prints, of course, are instrumental in allowing style to defy national demarcations and identities in giving art its irreverent mobility, its power to influence and spread that is so difficult to quantify or contain. Indeed, as is the case with many pioneers of our discipline, there are many artists that Wolfland conveniently ignored because they frustrated his racialising and nationalising formula. Tim's exploration of Cotman's etchings will touch on the instability of the aggressively enforced border between Britain and France. His paper looks at the period following the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars, a time characterised by intensive nationalism and a general politics of reaction. From Tim's paper, Cotman emerges as an artist aware of the special ability of images to mend fractious relationships, to bring similarity and connection rather than difference interview. As Tim will tell us, the prospectus advertising architectural antiquities of Normandy explicitly drew on the close relationship between the French and the British, noting that citizens of each country are bonded in many instances by blood. While it appears to subscribe to a biological conception of human difference that is more exclusive than inclusive, this comment also suggests the arbitrary nature of national borders at a time in which race and nation were being conflated. By Wolfland's time, references to the French and the British as distinct races were not uncommon. Cotman appears to go against the grain of this development. Tim shows us that Cotman was sensitive to the borderlessness of style as well as blood. His paper notes that the artist observed the same decorative motif on an abbey in the port city of Lavre as in churches in his native East Anglia. Greg's paper will argue that Gertin, despite his balking at the design of Versailles, was inspired by contemporary French prints. While his fellow British artists such as Farringdon scoffed at the work of French academic painters, Greg suggests that Gertin adapted for better or worse graphic landscapes of French places by French artists. Try as our art historical forefathers might have done to reduce style to place, nation and even race. Art is disobedient. As I've already suggested, prints, the most mobile art forms, are the most disobedient of all. Prints of landscapes and their buildings go a step further in refusing to naturalize human difference in terms of style. Despite human intervention and efforts to fragment and reorder, the natural world is as borderless as the architectural motifs that travel from place to place. Gillian's paper looks at the most, that most famous contemporary of Gertin and Cotman, J and W Turner. Published between 1807 and 1819, the Ubers Studiorum, the monumental series of etchings and mezzotints after Ternus designs, presents a view of the natural world that is international, if not global in scope. His landscapes are Swiss, Scottish, Greek. They represent the northern part of the Italian peninsula as well as the south and include scenes left ambiguous in terms of precise location. Also including quintessentially English scenes such as workers plowing a field with Eaton College Chapel in the background. A driving force behind this project was Ternus' desire to demonstrate his own individual genius, his capacity, as engraver John Piper said, and as Gillian reminds us, to delineate, quote, everything under the sun. In Ternus' series then, the question of nation, of national borders and styles, is dwarfed by the immensity of the artist's ambition and the breadth of his vision. Nation also recedes into the background when one breaks with the linear chronology that went along with the separation of European art into distinct national schools and instead views Ternus' series from the perspective of non-human geological time. Gillian's paper explores the way in which Ternus' series anticipates the work of contemporary theorists and artists preoccupied with the climate crisis. As we're all aware, this crisis is distinctly transnational, albeit unevenly distributed across the globe, for now at least. Each of these three papers show us that series of landscape prints, these series of landscape prints made in Britain or made by artists born in Britain elsewhere, that were produced during the first decades of the 19th century, are anything but provincial and should be retrieved from the margins of the history of art if that is where they in fact stand, with the exception of Ternus perhaps. They are objects that connect people, places, ideas and phases in time. They allow us to see past arbitrary fragmentation, if only so, we may view just how broken things really are. So I'm now going to hand over to Greg, and so I'm very excited to hand over to Greg, so he's going to give his paper now, followed by Tim, and then we'll have our break. The watercolourist Thomas Gertin travelled to Paris in late November 1801 on one of the first boats to cross the channel after the cessation of hostilities between Britain and France. Although Gertin's five months' stay in the French capital ultimately resulted in the publication of a set of aquatints titled 20 of the most picturesque views in Paris and its environs, his journey was not motivated initially by a desire to record the city. Indeed, it appears he did not even take any arts materials with him when he travelled. What he did carry to Paris, however, was the completed canvas of his London panorama, all 1,944 square feet of it, with the aim of putting his own public display in order to benefit financially from curiosity in his native city in the aftermath of war. Unfortunately for the not very savvy artist, Gertin appears to have fallen foul of the French copyright holder of the newly patented spectacle, and he was forced to find an alternative project that might help to repay at least some of the £100 lent to him by his brother and co-publisher of the picturesque views, John Gertin. The project Thomas settled upon sometime in the late winter of 1802 had two elements to it. Firstly, there were the soft ground actions, 20 in number, executed by the artist himself, and which were published during his lifetime. And secondly, as we have seen, there were the aquatint, which had appeared posthumously between December 1802 and April 1803 under the guidance of John Gertin. Fortunately, we are particularly well informed about the project's progress. Thus, we have a letter from Gertin to his brother, giving details of the publication's inception. There is an eyewitness account of the artist at work from the playwright, Thomas Holcroft, who accompanied him on sketching excursions in the environs of Paris. Then there is this hub that hitherto unpublished prospectus for the publication that details its marketing strategy, as well as John Gertin's accounts that record in detail its costs together with the income generated by sales. And finally, there are the pencil drawings that Gertin himself produced on the spot, as well as the prints themselves. The latter comprising various proofs, together with hand-coloured etchings, made as guidance for the specialist employed to add aquatint to the etched plates. It's right, I think, to begin with Gertin's drawings, because as both the title page and the prospectus emphasise, it was his name and status as the late, quote, celebrated artist that was advanced by John Gertin as the key, as the work's key selling point. It's equal at least to its subject matter. Drawn and etched by the late Thomas Gertin draws the fact that the end products are actually aquatints, and the emphasis is placed squarely on the etchings as autograph works, and as evidence of the artist's skills as a draftsman. The complete set of Gertin's original on-the-spot drawings, now in the British Museum, display two different facets of these abilities. Firstly, there are the eleven more or less panoramic views of Paris itself, centred on the unifying visual theme of the river. These vary in size, but they are all assembled from two or sometimes three small sheets of paper of approximately 16 by 24 centimetres. Small enough, in other words, to have fitted into a portable camera obscura, which would have allowed the artist to render the architectural subjects in sufficient detail and in a consistent format. Then secondly, there are eight views taken in the environs of Paris itself, which were the outcome of the excursions that Gertin undertook with Holcroft as his guide. I will return to the latter's significance, but here it is his role as an eyewitness of Gertin at work that is important. For as Holcroft noted, these rural views were made with a surprising, quote, dispatch in a much less laborious manner than the city views. They were not finished, he continued, but all the objects were in their proper place and sufficiently made out for him to accurately understand his own intentions. Comments made by Gertin to Holcroft also suggest why it wasn't the river featured so prominently in these Paris views. The gardens at Versailles were a significant feature in the publication. I'm also considering here the Voyage-Pitourestes de la France, but for an English artist Holcroft suggested echoing Gertin's sentiments. A treatise on geometry would be as good a book of landscape as Versailles can afford, and he pointedly left the scene without taking a sketch. The point is that similarly monumental symmetrical buildings and formal public spaces in the centre of Paris might be rendered more overtly picturesque through the inclusion of a river winding its way through the city. The image of the city mediated by an expanse of river scenery gives way to a close-up urban view in just one print, plate 10, titled View of the Gate of St Dennis, taken from the suburbs. A detailed street scene, which although it seems out of place in the publication as a whole, adds a welcome element of variety. The Aquatint is also the only one for which there is no pencil drawing. This may well have been lost, but it is also possible that in this one case the print was based on a large-scale colour sketch made on the spot and that it is therefore the residual outcome of a different approach to the project that was superseded at an early stage. Writing to his brother in England, Gertin noted that the sketches I make are done from the windows of a hackneyed coach, and that I altered my plan directly I got your letter, for I had then begun to sketch on a large scale and to colour on the spot, but now I am forgetting the best views I can and merely sketches. The change in Gertin's working practice was, according to the letter, prompted by an unspecified plan suggested by his patron, Sir George Beaumont. What exactly that is, is not known, but I suspect that change in Gertin's sketches was related to a significant shift in the Paris subjects themselves, from the close-up in close view scene here to much more panoramic scenes, and that whether consciously or not, this amounted to a prompt from the patron to his alluck to align his picturesque views more closely to a French topographic tradition of views which are exemplified, as we shall see, I hope, in the voyage pittoresque scenes. Turning to the different set of prints produced at various points in the creation of the finished aquitains, everything points to the project's prime objective as the autographed work of a celebrated artist, that's in distinction to the reproductive engravings of the voyage pittoresque, and as a consequence we are able to follow closely every aspect of Gertin's direct involvement in the project. Significantly we have a rare survival in the form of 18 of the tracings that Gertin made from his own drawings, and which he used to transfer his sketch to the etching plate. This was a complex procedure for a novice printmaker, and it no doubt entailed tuition from John Gertin, and Thomas working on a number of proofs such as the impression that survives for plate six, complete with his notes and pencil editions. John Gertin's accounts also refer to various costs incurred by the need to repair the plates, and at least a couple of them had to be abandoned and begun again. Then there are the two sets of hand-colored etchings that the artist produced himself. The first set, comprising just 16 prints, was in all probability created for distribution amongst the four professional printmakers who were employed by John Gertin to add aquitains to the plates etched by Gertin. Although there has been much confusion in the past, the prints in this series can generally be identified by their poor condition, with, as in this case, sections trimmed away to restore order to sheets presumably treated with scant respect in the studio. The other group of hand-colored etchings, which was complete until sold at auction in the 1950s, was created by Gertin as a presentation set for the dedicated team of the publication The Fifth Earl of Essex. John Gertin's accounts include the cost of three pound ten shillings and sixpence for mounting the drawings of Paris, as he termed the hand-colored prints, as well as the 50 pound Essex paid for them. It appears that John was being economical with the truth here when he claimed on the title page that the aquitains were made in quote, exact imitation of the original drawings in the collection of the Earl. John Gertin's accounts covering the first year after the publication of the picturesque views, that's April 1803 to April 1804, suggests that the strategy of targeting a luxury product under aristocratic patronage as an audience of connoisseurs and gentlemen eminently distinguished for their patronage of the fine arts, as the perspective puts it, was a highly successful one. A total of around 130 sets of aquitains were printed together with 20 sets of the etchings, and more than half of them were sold at six guineas for the proof sets, five guineas for the prints, and four guineas for the etchings. More particularly, John Gertin appreciated the significance of the interest shown by his brother's fellow artists, who account for as many as a third of the subscribers on his list. Thus, the prospectus, after listing six of the most prominent collectors, balances this with the same number of the most eminent men in the profession, quote. Led by the President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, it includes four other RA's with MW Turner Esquire RA, a conspicuous presence. However, in one respect, John Gertin seriously miscalculated, for whilst the aquitains with their titles in both English and French were equally targeted at the foreign market, the resumption of war put an end to those hopes. And in any case, the number of people who bought the prints out of curiosity about the state of post-revolutionary Paris seems to have been limited. Though since Gertin's publication was not reviewed and no comments relating to its subject have been recorded, it's impossible to say quite how much of its commercial success was down to the picturesque and interesting character of the views as the prospectus phrased it. At least that is my excuse for failing to consider the prints in their wider context as images of the French capital, and more specifically for not having hitherto noticed that Gertin's views of Paris and its environs were worked through the filter of contemporary French prints, and in particular with engravings used as illustrations for the voyage pittores de la France. The image in my mind of Gertin working tirelessly with a camera obscure in the centre of Paris to record details of its architecture, or out sketching freehand in the capital's environs, blinded me to what is the main thesis of my talk. The surprising thought, at least to me, that an engagement with a French voyage pittoresque helped to shape the picturesque views of a very English artist. Now, in my defence, the voyage pittoresque is a relatively little known publication in this country. The 12 volumes published between 1781 and 1796 are often confusingly catalogued under the title given them the first three volumes, and none of the engravings are actually dated. These amount to as many as 800 images, though have not found a definitive number for the plates. And the British Museum, for instance, holds only 55 of them, with only about half illustrated online. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that when I began work on the online catalogue of Gertin's work that will be published early next year under the aegis of the Paul Mellon centre, I had not knowingly come across the publication, though I did suspect that at least one of his Paris views was based on an older source by another artist. This shows the Church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève behind the Hotel de Ville in Paris, which was demolished between 1797 and 1800, and so Gertin's image could not have been based on an on-the-swat sketch of his own. Alerted to this possibility, I began to worry away at this troubling work, a view of the frigidarium part of the Roman baths in Paris, which at the time of Gertin's visit was used by a cooper to store barrels, but is now incorporated into the Musee de Cluny. Standing in the impressive interior, it is readily apparent that Gertin has so misrepresented the space as to indicate that he had not actually visited the site. The awkward way in particular that the blind arch to the centre of the composition has been turned as an angle so that it appears to be part of the back wall is particularly confusing, and the connection between the vaults and the rest of the structure has been fudged by an artist obviously confused by his source material. A visit to the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale fortunately turned up the source of Gertin's image and the cause of his uncertain perspective. Gertin has copied some of the details accurately enough, but others such as what appears to be the spokes of the barrel resting against the back wall are a simple misrepresentation or a misinterpretation of a second blind arch. However, it's unlikely that Gertin worked from Genilion's watercolour and his source surely is the etching from the volume nine of the voyage pittoresque. And so what I had hitherto thought was a candidate for one of the larger colour studies made on the spot in Paris as the precursor of his outline sketches for picturesque views turns out to be adapted from a French engraving. Returning to the view of the Hotel de Ville, the source for Gertin's watercolour became readily apparent. Another engraving made after work this time by Jean-Baptiste Lallement, again from the volume nine of the voyage pittoresque. And from there it was possible to put together a group of six watercolours of French architectural subjects, all based on prints from the voyage pittoresque, and for which, unlike the Paris views, Gertin could not have taken in the location on his visit to France. There are thus two views taken from illustrations to volume six showing Compierre, north-east of Paris. The second of which was known for a long time bizarrely as the entrance to the Grotto Basilico in Italy. And then there are two cathedral scenes showing firstly an interior view of Long Cathedral and secondly an exterior view of Lyon Cathedral from volumes nine and ten respectively. The latter was listed simply as unidentified cathedral until its source was found, whilst the interior view of Long Cathedral was said to show the nave of Canterbury. Keene students of Gertin's career will not be surprised to find that the artist worked from secondary sources, even at this late date. So firmly had the practice been established since his earliest work for patrons, such as the amateur artist and antiquarian James Moore, who commissioned numerous finished watercolours from his own sketches, or John Henderson, who ordered the same from prints and slight sketches in his possession. Gertin's motivation for copying in this case however is far from clear. I have suggested in the past the artist perhaps took to copying prints in Paris with nothing to do after the collapse of his hopes for showing his panorama and with no sketches of French subjects to hand. Certainly he is known to have made three copies of 17th century etchings by Hermann van Svanveld, adding Paris to the date and the signature. But it's not actually clear if the six watercolours made from the pittoresse voyage prints were painted in France. The paper used for the view of the ruins of the Roman baths was certainly made in England, and given that all the sketches definitely drawn on the spot in Paris are on paper manufactured in or bought in France. It's a reasonable assumption that the watercolour as well as this watercolour as well as the others was painted in London. But equally, there is actually no reason for them not to be produced prior to the trip to France. And given that John Henderson is the first known owner of the interior view of Long Cathedral, it's not inconceivable that Gertin was introduced to the voyage pittoresque by the man who commissioned watercolours from prints in his collection as early as 1796 or 97. The reality is strengthened by the fact that Henderson was the first owner of another watercolour based on the French print. His view of the facade of the city home of the prior of the Templars order is not based on an on the spot sketch as one might expect, but surprisingly, an engraving depicting the transportation of Louis the 16th and his family to their imprisonment in the 1792. Having said all of that, there is some evidence that Gertin himself brought back the prints from from France in April 1802. John Gertin records details of the contents of his brother's studio after his death, noting the presence of quote books of French Prince landscapes bound. I suspect that it's not irrelevant that the first known owner of the view of the Hotel de Ville was the engraver Samuel William Reynolds, who from some time around 1799 to 1800 began to act on Gertin's behalf in a role somewhere between dealer and agent. It was he who was responsible for selling many of Gertin's finest watercolours as well as producing a series of Mexitans after the artist's work. One of the six watercolours of the second French scene of the second hand French scenes are of the highest quality, and indeed my predecessor's catalogue of Gertin's works, the artist's descendant Thomas Gertin questioned the attribution of the drawings. However, the discovery of the sources for the works do explain at least some of their evidence shortcomings and their simplified compositions are at least a noticeable improvement on the voyage pittres prints. I wonder therefore if rather than being commissioned from Henderson at an early date, whether they were not instead made to be engraved by Reynolds. His list of assets drawn up on the 14th of October 1801 includes plates from drawings by Gertin to the value of £112. Could it therefore be that the six drawings were made for Reynolds to engrave and that the two men had in mind their own version of the voyage pittres designed perhaps to appeal to English travellers who either did not have access to the content to the continent or have painted later wanted souvenirs of their visits. Whatever the case, Gertin's direct engagement with the voyage pittres requires us to examine the possible influence of the publication on Gertin's similarly titled picturesque views, though in this instance there is no question of the artist actually copying the French Prince. Having said that, however, there is evidence of this, there is the evidence of this sheet featuring a man in the Carnivalesque costume, Gertin stayed coincided with Carnival time, and six other figures, two of which reappear in the picturesque views. The seated man, touched with colour to the left, is found in reverse in the village of Shea, plate 17, whilst the standing figure with a strange hat depicted in three related positions features in the Pont Neuf and the Mint, plate eight. Intriguingly, the print is inscribed by Gertin Laliment de Saint, or design I think, presumably referring to Jean-Baptiste Laliment, the author of the painting of Lyon Cathedral that was the source of the print Gertin copied earlier. It is possible therefore that some of the figures shown in the Paris prints were also copied from the voyage pittres, though my searches have not yet revealed any obvious examples. Turning to Gertin's prints and specifically to the river views in central Paris, there are perhaps half a dozen cases of a distinct overlap with the Paris scenes in volumes seven and nine of the voyage pittresque. For instance, both publications include views of the Pont de la Tournelle taken from the arsenal with the western towers and Notre Dame prominent behind. Likewise, both sets of views include the Pont Neuf, again seen with the towers of Notre Dame beyond, and they adopt a similar viewpoint that has part of the Louvre framing the image to the left, and I show the two on top of each other. It's perfectly possible that Gertin was inspired by the voyage pittres prints to adopt such similar viewpoints. But arguably there are only so many angles and spots from which the city's main sites can be viewed to advantage, and given that we know from his letter to John Gertin that his sketches were made from quote the windows of a hackney coach. This was further limited to the capital's bridges and roads. In fact, it would be more characteristic of Gertin to seek out alternative views to those of his French contemporaries than to look for presidents for his choices of subject. Moreover, it's actually the difference between the two sets of images that are the more striking. The point to the way that the architectural element of the French Prince is counterbalanced by a lively foreground depicting a variety of riverbank occupations that leaves the equivalent area in Gertin's composition looking comparatively bare and empty. To lay down the idea of influence in the city center scheme scenes, the eight views made in the environments in the environs of Paris are a different matter as the testimony of Thomas Holcroft makes clear. Holcroft begins his account of the short excursions they undertook by emphasizing Gertin's problem both with the French language and his mobility. He is fairly ailing from the respiratory illness that will kill him later in the year, as well as his role in directing the artist to suitable landscape subjects, a kind of duty to juniors and the arts as he put it. According to the inquiries which I made amongst artists he added, he conducted Gertin to quote the places that were esteemed the most picturesque and to which the students in landscape most frequently resorted. And these invariably turn out to be the subject of views in the voyage pittoresque. One of the first stops was the village of Charenton to the east of Paris, the subject of a couple of views in the French publication. This according to Holcroft was beautifully situated at the junction of two rivers, the Marne and the Seine. And the views around it are many of them excellent for the landscape painter, water foliage buildings and mills are among the objects before him. And one of these views Gertin has preserved he added referring to what ultimately became plates 19 and 20 of the picturesque views. The water mills referred to by Holcroft, where indeed popular subjects with contemporary French artists, but it was surely his familiarity with the voyage pittoresque prints that directed him to Charenton. Holcroft had already been in Paris for a year or so when he met Gertin, and his knowledge of French topographical drawing and printmaking was no doubt shaped by his need to procure illustrations for his own account of his Paris social. The two volumes of his travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris. The 12 engravings he commissioned where he claimed executed after drawings made at Paris under my direction by a French artist who was specifically directed not to include any of the picturesque effect of the sort favoured by Gertin. If it was not already the case, then Holcroft's efforts to illustrate his own account of Paris and its environs would have brought him into contact with both the voyage pittoresque prints and their makers. And if we cannot point to overwhelming evidence of the direct influence of the French series on Gertin, then at least their impact can be inferred with Holcroft and his mission to conduct the artist to the places that were esteemed the most picturesque as the intermediary. Having said that, it is clear that what is pittoresque in a French context did not always equate with picturesque as Gertin understood the term. And much of the interest in Holcroft's account lies in the artist's dismissal of the pictorial potential of celebrated locations as well as a broader criticism of the deficiencies of the landscapes of France. In this case, the gardens at Bellevue, which despite their elevated position and views across the same valley, were deemed to be too formal for his purposes. Instead, Gertin descended the slopes and took a view from the terrace near the bridge seen to the right here, and this was reproduced as plate 13. I wonder, however, whether in this case, the composition of the French print might not have still informed his approach to two more subjects gathered during Holcroft's tour. The view of the waterworks at Marley was Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the distance for plate 15, and the view from the palace terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye as well. It may be that the compositional similarities between the two sets of prints are of the coincidental type found in the inner city views. But regardless of the degree of intentionality involved, these compositions are clearly ensued with a well-established French topographical tradition of representation of Paris and its environs. I want to bring my talk to a conclusion by returning briefly to the prospectus drafted by John Gertin as part of his marketing strategy for the picturesque views, and in particular to his claim that in addition to its attractions with the connoisseur, the publication might also appeal to the fashionable world, quote, who flocked to Paris since the preliminaries of peace. To that purpose he continued, the costume has been particularly attended to and is so strikingly different to our own and so extremely picturesque. However, as we have already observed, the figures certainly in comparison with those seen in the voyage picturesque views are small in scale, poorly integrated into the composition, and display little interest in the occupations and diversions of the citizens of Paris. To take another pair of similar compositions, what is so striking to me is the emptiness of Gertin's scene compared to its French counterpart. Remembering the way that the artist took a view of the internment of Louis XVI and his family and stripped out the figures to render the architectural setting in almost prosaic terms, I wonder if something analogous is happening here. Gertin's empty foregrounds are no doubt fine for the display of the artist's command of variable light and the play of shadows, but the identity of his views as Parisian is dependent on architectural subjects may be recognisable by the carefully delineated detail of the etching. John Gertin's claims of the prince as a picturesque portrait of the city and its citizenry are simply false, therefore, a typical example of a publicist hyperbole. Indeed, they are arguably a more accurate analysis of the city views in the voyage picturesque, and therein lies the crux of the problem that I have increasingly with Gertin's picturesque views. Namely, they essentially adopt the French topographic tradition in terms of their composition and subject, whilst jettisoning what makes them most interesting, the balance between the architectural grandeur of the city and the sense of a living and working environment. Some think, ironically, that even Holcroft managed in this one instance from the illustrations of his Paris volume, using an image taken from a French topographer Pierre de Maschi that frames the architectural grandeur of the Louvre with the everyday life and industry of the capital. Empty foregrounds hardly matter in Gertin's watercolours, but here they disappoint our reasonable expectations from a set of views of Paris, and what we are given to such good effect in the view of Port Saint-Denis. The addition of aquatint to Gertin's autographic etchings by artists without his skills simply cannot compensate from compositions which are too often featureless and lacking in variety. What I mean might be better understood in relation to the other major print series, which stemmed from the piece of Amiens, the hand-coloured aquatints after the work of the French emigre artist Jean-Claude Nat. In this print depicting the same subject as plate nine of the picturesque views, Nat lowers his viewpoint below the bridge from which Gertin took his view, and then looking to the dramatic example of the etchings of the great architectural drassman Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Nat develops a composition that at least begins to evoke something of the contemporary revolutionary associations of the site. The Conciergerie prison played a central role in the events of the terror, including the incarceration of the Queen Mary Antoinette prior to her execution. But typically in Gertin's image, nothing of this is even hinted at, as though the need to appeal to both the French and British market has encouraged the view of the city that is curiously timeless, even a historical. It is therefore not surprising that the picturesque views appeal to Gertin's fellow artists because they are less about Paris and more about Gertin. Though in the semi-autographic medium, the acquaintance, there is arguably not enough of the latter to fully satisfy the interests of the modern viewer. Thank you. Thank you very much, Greg. That was great. Thank you. So, Tim, could you, Tim, could you get your, start showing your screen and for time's sake, we can launch straight into your paper? Absolutely. I'll tell Copman's architectural antiquities of Normandy, a catastrophic miscalculation, question mark. In the brief economic boom that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, publishing was a hazardous business. Even the name of the great Turner was no guarantee of the success of such a project. In 1818, when he eventually completed his architectural antiquities of Norfolk, after six years, rather than the two initially promised to his subscribers, Copman still needed to recruit six additional publishers in addition to himself to try and recoup his outlay. How much these booksellers acted as investors with cash up front and how much as distributors merely selling the finished product is not known. When Henry Bone republished this series in 1838, he maintained that this was the only one of the three sets of Norfolk etchings Copman worked on during this period, which was conventionally published at all. The other two comprising another hundred planes were never formally issued beyond a handful of personal contacts of the artist. Yet, even before any of these works was complete, Copman was committing himself to a far more ambitious project. A hundred etchings of buildings in Normandy, which he embarked on in 1817, but did not manage to complete until six years later in 1822. Copman's motivation may have been partly commercial and he also expected the project to enhance his reputation among the core constituency of antiquarians and amateur historians. He publicly associated himself with through the individual dedications on the plates of the Norfolk antiquities. One particularly splendid Norman doorway at Roxham on the Norfolk Broads, dubbed barbaric and glorious in the latest edition of Pesner, is addressed to Frank Sayers, a Norwich doctor, poet and polymath. In 1805, he had published an essay entitled Hints on English architecture, in which he ventured into the highly contentious debate on the chronology and nomenclature of medieval style. Sitting firmly on the fence, he dubbed the period immediately after the Norman conquest, Saxo-Norman. When John Britain came to issue the fifth volume of his antiquities of Great Britain in 1835, long after the first four volumes of the series, he gave it the additional title, Chronological History and Graphic Illustrations of Christian Architecture in England, and appended a reading list of no less than 66 books and articles, all of which had a bearing on discussions of the dating, the terms and the origins of architectural style in the Middle Ages. 40 of these appeared between 1800 and the last references in 1822, suggesting publication may well have been delayed by the constant financing difficulties Britain himself faced. The list did include Sayers' contribution, which was evidently considered of general relevance. In 1813, fellow of the Society of Antiquities John Sidney Hawkins had entered the fray, with his, a history of the origin and establishment of Gothic architecture, he lamented the recent quotes, difficulty of procuring correct and minute intelligence, quote, of buildings on the continent, yet he continued that, quote, it cannot be doubted that an industrious and intelligent antiquary would certainly find many structures which have hitherto been unobserved. This is the role that Cotman took it upon himself to fill. Due to numerous other commitments, he did not set off for France until two years into the peace in June 1817. His first trip lasted seven weeks. He returned in 1818 for a further 11 weeks, and finally in 1820 for 10 weeks, making more than 29 weeks in all. His sense of mission and the importance of the original contribution he expected to make to debates which had been raging for the last two decades is evident from the very first plate he etched on his return. The Abbey Church of Graville on the Seine just east of Le Havre, and in the British Museum print room there is a complete set of the prints, and for the first half of them Cotman kept very precise self documentation. So, even though this wasn't the first church to be drawn, he tells us it was certainly the first to be etched. This is an unassuming building in itself, but one which displayed the feature of interlaced round headed arches forming pointed arches, the very issue around which the origins of the Gothic style were held to revolve. Cotman was well aware of the presence of this decorative device on the facades of some of the most impressive churches in East Anglia. He had drawn some bottles priori Colchester as early as 1804 and made a print of Castle Rising Church for the antiquities of Norfolk in 1813. In the print of the dilapidated tower of the same church, Cotman had inscribed the caption Saxon Arches. However, when the letterpress was eventually published on completion of the 60 prints in 1818, the style was said to be Norman. Although written in the first person, the brief commentary was not by Cotman, but by his employer in Yarmouth, Dawson Turner. Cotman was learning by experience some of the complexities of this terminological minefield, and it was not to be the last time when his voice was effectively usurped by Dawson Turner. Perhaps because of the weight of responsibility on his shoulders, on several occasions Cotman appears to have entirely lost the sparkle and variety which made the etchings of the Norfolk antiquities so visually appealing. His etching of the nave of St Stephen's Con adopts the style of John Carter's ancient architecture of England published as long ago as 1787. Rather than exploit the light touch capable with the etching needle, Cotman uses it to attempt to emulate the rigors of engraving. Looking at these images of gravile and of con, one might even be tempted to ask what place they have in a seminar dedicated to landscape prints, however broadly defined. And it is this very question which brings us directly to the issue of why Cotman's travels brought him such little success. The public at large still had a voracious appetite for travel books, and as continental travel resumed after the wars, dozens were published every year, but very few were illustrated. Cotman's book was addressed to a different audience entirely. But even among the large constituency of amateur antiquarians, the question of the priority of English or French builders in the development of the pointed Gothic style, which had been such a burning issue of national pride during the war, now assumed far less significance. As the Reverend John Milner had advised in his book of 1811, a treatise on the ecclesiastical architecture of England during the Middle Ages, quotes, controversies require to be conducted with coolness and without any mixture of national or other partiality, quote. Milner credits Sir Henry Engelfield, a fellow antiquarian, but more importantly, a good friend and patron of Cotman's, who had done him the unparalleled service of recommending him to his sister, Theresa Chumley, in Yorkshire, with profound knowledge of medieval architecture. Yet when he heard that Cotman was departing for France in June, 1817, Engelfield wrote to give him a quotes, unlimited order for drawings of Amiens, Beauvais and Abbeville. It was no longer the precursors of the Gothic, which were his primary focus, but its fullest flowering in the finest of the northern French cathedrals. Cotman, who was wholly focused on his own researches, never visited any of these cities. Nearly a year after his second long stint in France in the summer of 1818, Cotman eventually got round to printing a prospectus for his architectural antiquities of Normandy, dating it September 1819. Its appearance at that moment could well have been made in accordance with Hudson Gurney's advice that Cotman quotes, should not advertise for his subscribers till he has got them, in case those he possesses be not sufficient, quote. The fact that the lettered plates are dated the 7th of October 1819 suggests that Cotman may well have been ready with the first instalment slightly earlier than the eventual publication date of the 1st of January 1820. There were supposed to be four deliveries of 25 prints each. And Cotman held off in the expectation of rounding up a few more buyers. Alternatively, this could be an early hint of the chaos which was to upset the delivery of plates and text, and which meant that no list of subscribers was in fact ever printed. The text of the prospectus was emphatic in its resolution to emphasise the common bonds between England and France, rather than the enmity which had separated the countries for more than two decades. The work was to be, quotes, the means of throwing some degree of light upon the history of a country most intimately connected with our own by language, manners and laws, and in many instances also by blood, and governed for more than a century by one common sovereign. It was only at this point that Cotman began to think seriously about the provision of the text to support and explain his etchings. He had a slip printed dated Yarmouth December 1819 to distribute with the first instalment, explaining that the promised text was not ready. And there is one such slip in the Sohn Museum copy, giving one instance at least of the initial readership. On the 3rd of February 1820, he wrote to William Stevenson, the Norwich bookseller and proprietor of the Norfolk Chronicle, I was much gratified with the satisfaction you were pleased to express towards the first part of my antiquities of Normandy. A good letterpress will add greatly to the interest without doubt, and that, I may fairly venture to say, will be the case. The text was not supplied to subscribers until 1822, with the last of the four instalments of the prints more than a year late. In the event, it was provided by Dawson Turner, who, far from providing an irrational thread to link the images to each other, still less address the question of their relevance to the study of architecture in England, Turner plagiarised his own account of a tour in Normandy, which appeared in 1820, and weighed the volumes down with transcripts of charters and local histories. Cotman had been too reliant on familiar models, especially John Britton's Architecture Antipodes of Great Britain, of which four volumes had appeared between 1807 and 1814. Like Britton, Cotman presented the plates in a more or less random order. Only at the very end was there a chronological index attempting to place the buildings in sequence. Following neither the geographical route of a tour, nor the chronological sequence of a history, Cotman's volumes for all their lavish folio format were unwieldy, and as Britton himself said, when he published his own version of what he thought Cotman should have done, of interest only to the quotes Amateur and the Antiquary. Although Cotman was one of the first English artists to travel in France, by the time the prints were ready, any advantage had been lost. Henry Edridge made a tour of Normandy in 1817, and the watercolours he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819 give a far more atmospheric impression of the cramped streets of cities such as Rouen than does Cotman's view of the cathedral for all its technical brilliance. Edridge's work may perhaps have provided the incentive to Samuel Prout to travel to Normandy that same year, 1819. From that moment Prout became the continental tourist par excellence, and even Turner could hardly keep up with him. After a favourable response to the first watercolours he presented to the public in 1820, Prout immediately followed up with a small group of prints. Crucially, these were made by lithography, some of the very first travel images to use the medium commercially. No sooner were these complete than perhaps set off down the Rhine, and the following year his first complete volume of lithographs, illustrations of the Rhine appeared. Despite their novelty or perhaps because of it, the series passed between three different publishing houses before it was completed in 1826, a clear signal of the precarious state of the print market during this decade. Comparison of Edridge and Prout's images with Cotmans gives further insight into Cotman's misjudgment. After 20 years of virulent anti-French propaganda, the English at large took their superiority over the French for granted, and had they not just proved it once and for all at Waterloo. The literary scholar Seamus Dean has written of the post-war period as characterised by, quotes, an almost unprecedented hostility to any formulation of an attitude toward France which was not dismissive. True, the English flocked to Paris in their droves, but the rest of the country was best avoided. Edridge and Prout, with their cramped streets and crumbling masonry to a greater or lesser extent pander to this view, Cotman celebrating the refinement and elegance of French craftsmanship did not. One of the few large-scale oil paintings of the Parisian street scene from the period was painted by another Norwich artist, John Crune. It depicts the Boulevard des Italiens, one of the most fashionable streets in Paris, but apart from a promenading couple in the left corner, the view is dominated by street markets and hawkers, the common people who were usually beneath the notice of the average English tourist. It was painted for Hudson Gurney, the banking partner of Cotman's employer, Dawson Turner. The Gurneys were Quakers and part of a large faction of dissenters and radicals in Norwich, many of whom have voiced their support for the revolution over the past two decades, to the extent that Norwich was often referred to as Jacobin City. Both Gurney and Turner went out of their way throughout the revolutionary period to maintain contact with French scholars. Turner's primary interest was in botany, and it was his friendship established by letter with Jean-Vincent Félix Lamoureux, professor of botany at the University of Caen, that opened up a whole network of gentlemen scholars who proved vital in directing Cotman towards buildings of particular interest in establishing the connections between Normandy and Britain before and after the conquest. When they eventually met in Caen, Cotman drew Lamoureux's portrait, seen here in a French reworking of Mary Turner, Turner's wife's etching after Cotman's drawing. It is often remarked that British antiquarianism of the later 18th and 19th centuries is intrinsically nationalistic. It is centred on the discovery and evaluation of the national heritage. The huge numbers of images of British castles and cathedrals painted and engraved during the Napoleonic period can only have bolstered the general sense of their contribution to British national identity. For Cotman to have based his entire work on what was essentially a revival of 1066, a Norman invasion, which Britain had just spent every fibre of its being trying to prevent, was hardly likely to succeed. The implication of the great edifices of Durham and Norwich, let alone Peterborough or Ely, owed anything to French influence was never going to win him friends, fame or fortune. The attitude of John Scott, the influential editor of The London Magazine, and the third of his books on modern France, sketches of manners published in 1821, felt that the French population should feel only shame and that to reduce them to their, quote, proper low level was a, quote, moral duty. Only this can, quote, reduce the hurtfulness of their example and in some measure obliterate the stain they have affixed on the character of mankind. In conclusion, I have one further thought how Cotman's hopelessly over-optimistic expectations for his articulate architectural antiquities of Normandy may have got the better of him. We have seen the desire among the antiquarian community to know more about buildings on the continent and the sympathy for France, which was a signal feature of Norwich society, as well as the personal networks established by Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney, all of which may have led Cotman to over-invest in a project conceived in a spirit of post-war optimism but soon mired in the realities of imperialistic chauvinism. This opens the possibility that landscape print publishing may not be influenced only by the interests of particular communities or towns or regions, but also by personal affiliation. As an artist whose father and sisters were haberdashes, all involved in the business of fashion, did Cotman have a further predisposition to favour the French? And here are a couple of adverts from the Norwich papers slightly later in the 1820s showing how the family business was providing the latest in French materials to the citizens of Norwich. As a coder, I can only leave you with a glorious might have been. The architectural antiquities of Normandy only contains a handful of prints which might fit the description of landscape, but during his final trip to France in 1820, Cotman himself became unsure whether his focus on architecture was the right one. He envisaged a follow-up publication to be called the picturesque tour of Normandy and got so far as to create around 20 fully finished monochrome views. He was so dispirited by the reception of the antiquities that he abandoned this project. However, when he sold off all the drawings for the antiquities in 1824, he could not bear to part with these and retain them until the end of his life. Cotman was visited in London by his former pupil Robert Geldart in June 1842, just a month before his death. These were the drawings gathered in their own portfolio that they looked at together. Thinking back over the last 20 years, at the continental tours of Turner, Prout and a host of other artists, Cotman could take pride in being a pioneer, but must have felt at least a hint of regret that these prints never saw the light of day. And that is a regret that I for one cannot help sharing. Thank you, Tim. That was fantastic. So I'll let Gillian set up and I should say that if any of you have questions, please just get them ready now so that we can fit as many in as possible when Gillian has finished with her paper because you've got to end promptly at 2pm. So I'll hand over to Gillian now and if you just have your questions in your mind, ready to go, ready to pop into the chat. Thank you very much, Cora, and thank you to Mark and Felicity, Sarah, Danny and Shauna as well for organising it. And I would also just like to thank Kristiana Bamgartner and Emma Stibman for sharing a great deal of information about their practices. In 1807, JMW Turner launched the Lieberstudiorum, a self-published series of prints made in a combination of hard-ground etching and mezzo-tint on copper plates from his designs. The outlines and the mezzo-tinting was executed mostly by professional engravers on the Turner's micromanaging supervision. Though the artist, an avid technical experimenter, engraved a small number of plates himself, and there you see the extraordinary drawing for the plate of Pete Bogue on the top left, Turner's etching, and then George Clint's superb mezzo-tint. And then there's just the larger version so you can get a better sense of the extraordinary quality of the engraving. James Lahey, the master printer, printed the plates and Turner often reworked them between impressions. Turner issued the prints in parts of five at irregular intervals, intending to produce a hundred in total. However, he abandoned publication after he published the fourteenth part in 1819, though twenty further plates were at various stages of production and some of publication quality, and there is the first five prints, the first part, which we don't know exactly when it was published, sometime in 1807. The Lieber was a lifelong preoccupation in the mid-1840s toward the end of his life. Turner created a series of canvases based on compositions from the series that remained unexhibited, and there is the plate of Norman Castle and the very well-known late unfinished painting in the Turner bequest. He did not produce a prospectus or letterpress, and his few remarks concerning the project were enigmatic. He did, however, exhibit a brief handwritten text at his gallery, stating his objective to produce, quote, a classification of the various styles of landscape. This, the historic, mountainous, pastoral, marine, and architectural, unquote, on the left hand you can see actually a draft of the text for the paper wrapper in one of Turner's sketchbooks and a blue printed wrapper, which you can see also contains the categories that Turner assigned to the plates. An initial letter denoting one of these categories was engraved above each image, and this painting, which is a print which is known as Woman and Tambourine, many of the prints do not actually have titles engraved on them, so these are given titles, but you can see at the top it says EP. Turner immediately transgressed from his didactic schema, however, introducing, in the first part, a plate inscribed with the initials, EP. Turner never glossed this category, but in the manuscript contents list, he referred to this plate as Claude EP. Several interpretations have been proposed, including EP. Pastoral and Elevated Pastoral, but the latter seems most likely. Despite the apparent simplicity of this mission statement, the Libre is not a straightforwardly didactic book of studies, but rather a complex and unstable amalgam of different discursive models, including the treaties on European landscape art, topographical print series, and personal manifesto. The engraver John Pye, who collaborated with Turner and knew him well, later noted that the artist's objective was, quote, to demonstrate, unquote, that he could, quote, delineate everything that is visible under the sun, unquote. And though Turner did not quite achieve that objective, his position is palpably manifested in the Libre. At the time of its conception, Turner had pedagogic conditions on his mind. He was the sole applicant for the position of professor of perspective when it was advertised in 1807 and was elected on December 10th of that year. Turner's preparations for his copiously illustrated lectures were conscientious and time-consuming and he did not deliver the first lecture until January 7th, 1811. The following day, Farringdon noted in his diary that, quote, Turner is desirous of having a professorship of landscape painting established in the Royal Academy, unquote. The last perspective lecture of the inaugural series, given five weeks later, an entitled background's introduction of architecture and landscape, took issue with the accepted notion of relegating landscape to the lowly status of a background for history painting, arguing instead for the acceptance of landscape painting as a separate genre in the hierarchy of art. And this is the frontispiece, which actually Turner issued midway through the series, which was not unusual for part works. But this may be a symptom of his not exactly knowing what his series was about when he embarked on it, which I think can also be a feature of these serial works. If backgrounds, the lecture could be interpreted as Turner's first step to achieving his ambition to be professor of landscape painting, as Gerald Ziff suggested, the Leber can be read as its counterpart, a portable visual history of European landscaping and a personal manifesto with illustrations alluding both to old masters such as left to right, right to bottom, Claude Lorraine, Piranesi, Nicholas Poussin, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens and Salvador Rosa. And to artists of the British school, both past and contemporary, including Richard Wilson, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Gertin, George Moreland, David Wilkie and Augustus Kulkott. And of course, Turner featured himself and a number of compositions are very distinctly bad, his hallmarks in terms of style and subject, and some of them are translations of paintings that he'd already sold on the market. Despite the sporadic publication of parts, his unfinished status and the lack of a letterpress to provide a textual gloss, Turner clearly regarded the Leber as an entity, indeed a book, and objected violently to the sets being broken up into individual plates by dealers and their examples of reprimands to dealers. According to Ruskin, he frequently asked, quote, what is the use of them, but together, unquote. I apologize for this poor quality slide, which is a list of books I compiled on the Leber, which was published in my 1996 cake ankle also, takes us up to there, and the first one is 1861. And if we devote attention to the Leber studio, although the work has received sustained scholarly attention since the 1860s, and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications, I propose in this paper that Turner's open-ended series still offers possibilities for new readings as methodological approaches evolve. There are several different distinct strands in the copious early literature, fizz, catalogs for exhibitions that focused on Turner's creative processes by deconstructing the many annotated proofs acquired by prescient collectors in Turner's lifetime. Publications that assemble fragments of evidence relating to the works creation and publication history, notably the lexicographer John Lewis Rogers, notes and memoranda respecting the Leber studio, a fascinating hybrid of anecdotal detritus, letters, editorial commentary, marginalia and footnotes. Catalog Resonades by W.G. Rawlingson and A.J. Finberg. And this is another category of literature, speculations on the meaning of the series, preeminently John Ruskin's modern painters, and Ruskin also advocated the use of Leber etchings and finished prints for the teaching of drawing. Since I discovered the Leber as an undergraduate at Nottingham University in the early 1980s, my understanding of the work has shifted as my art historical and curatorial preoccupations had changed when working toward my exhibition at the Tate in 1986, John Gage's pioneering scholarship on Turner's intellectual concerns and his deep interest in process and colour theory was central to my work. My interpretations of scenes of British landscape, which often contained laboring figures and signifies that the war with Napoleon were conditioned by the relatively new area of the social history of British art, is proponents John Barrow and David Salkin, as well as scholars of the emerging discipline of cultural geography, including Steve Daniels. Deconstruction and other theoretical strategies predominated in the field of literature, and I was influenced by a provocative essay by Marcia Pointon, a scholar of English literature turned art historian that interrogated the Leber quite its status as a book. I later worked on the visual culture of the British Empire and revisited the Leber, scrutinising it for signifiers of empire and the institution of slavery if one accepts the frequent allusions to Britain's military and economic power, which was very costly to produce. Sorry, if one accepts the frequent allusions to Britain's military and economic power, there are few overt references, but one could argue that the project, which was very costly to produce, had been bankrolled by the La Sel's family, patronage in the 1790s and in the 18 teens by his work for the notorious slave holder, Mad Jack Fuller. In 2007, Sam Smiles published his revelatory discovery that in 1805 Turner had participated in a speculative scheme to finance the pen or cattle farm in Jamaica to be operated by enslaved workers, demonstrating that Turner was fully complicit in the institution of slavery just two years before the British slave trade was abolished. My current preoccupation shared with many is the future of the Earth in our current age as the Anthropocene. I take my starting point for this term the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1750s. Turner's taxonomy may constitute a valuable model for art historians and practitioners. As they develop new vocabularies to respond to the transformation of the world's landscapes by climate change and pollution. As David Matlus noted in his important essay published in the seminal landscape now issue of British art studies to which I am indebted a new lexicon of aesthetic terms is already in formation. As Matlus noticed in 2015 cultural historian Robert McFarlane proposed the compilation of a desecration phrase book that might contain terms such as trash vortices and physical geographer Stephen Tooth responded with his online glossary for the Anthropocene listing categories that included Anthropocenic, Anthroposaur, Glastic load, Capital scene and Plaster scene. In my short remaining time I would like to very briefly discuss in relation to this evolving taxonomy the practices of Christiana Baumgart and Emma Stibblen R.A. two contemporary artists who make prints that explore the aesthetics of landscapes transformed by global warming and environmental degradation and whose practices arguably have strong affinities with turners. Both artists speak of their emotional and bodily engagement with their works on paper which unlike the Lieber are typically large in scale and encourage an immersive viewing experience. Stibblen makes drawings and prints depicting environments that are undergoing transformation including the polar regions, volcanoes, deserts, coastal and urban locations. Her approach to landscape is driven by her desire to understand how human activity and the forces of nature shape our surroundings. She does this through location based research often working alongside geologists and scientists sketching and making photographic records and like Turner returns to her studio to transfer her working documents into large scale drawn and printed works and her studio is at Spike Island in Bristol where there is also a print studio so she can move seamlessly between her own studio and the print room and these are both intaglio prints one as an outcome of one of her several trips to Antarctica and on the left a print also has an enormous drawing related artwork called Forest Fires. Stibblen has returned repeatedly to the meadow glass at Chamonix the erstwhile spectacular glacier that Turner visited in his Tour of France and the Alps in 1802. Turner later engraved his own print of the meadow glass for the lever shown at top left underscoring with his etched line the terrifying jagged forms of the ice crystals he also assigned it a new category and it's not very legible at the top of the print MS, likely meaning mountainous sublime but never glossed. In 1849 and 1854 Ruskin also visited the meadow glass he made drawings with sepia colour ink that recall the colouration of the lever and on his second visit with the assistance of Frederick Crawley the Geriatypes and that's on the top right which is Ruskin and Crawley's astonishing the Geriatype of the glacier. Stibblen was commissioned to trace Ruskin's trip for the 2018 exhibition Ruskin and the Storm Cloud organised by York Art Gallery and Abbott Hall which explored Ruskin's prescience concerns with environmental pollution the glacier began to recede in 1850 and by 2018 when Stibblen pictured at lower left, this is the photograph she was there last week for a Radio 3 programme on the sublime to which I eagerly look forward when Stibblen visited it had retreated by two kilometres a stark fact that she recorded by making a cyanotype that's the bottom right the sensation induced by witnessing this graphic illustration of the effects of global warming might be categorised as a form of the sublime one in which the viewer's visceral shock arises from the empty space left by the ice's recession where there was formerly a moving ocean of ice now a few vestiges of moraine litter the site the evacuated sublime okay and I am wrapping up here the German artist Christiana Bangottner pictured in her studio making one of her large-scale woodcuts lives and works in Leipzig her starting point is typically a still from one of her videos or a photograph but during the process of translation into woodcut the image undergoes a radical transformation becoming an entirely new artistic statement for more than a decade from 1999 Beaumd Gartner was preoccupied with subjects of modern life including industrial sites motorways, warfare, surveillance urban spaces and artificial light but since 2012 her fascination with the operations of nature in particular sunlight and water have gradually come to the fore in her practice in 2018 she was invited to make work for the 9th Quebec City Biennial she travelled there that summer for a short residence the city is dominated by the vast St Lawrence River which is fed by two subsidiary rivers and the cityscape is articulated by spectacular waterfalls that are tourist attractions Beaumd Gartner visited several of these waterfalls and other riverine sites where the river is notoriously polluted by industrial waste agricultural runoff and sewage carried by the subsidiary rivers Beaumd Gartner discovered that the polluted water was filtered at purification plants and delivered to the city as drinking water she also became fascinated by the enormous piles of snow the city from pollution, garbage, petrol and rubber that had been removed from the streets to one of the 29 dump sites in Quebec City during the winter but was still there in June she learned that the snow had been melted poured into the sewers purified and funneled into the domestic water supply like the water in the polluted rivers these snow mountains exude heat as well as fumes a grotesque subversion of the natural order on her return to Leipzig Beaumd Gartner conceived her project consisting of five monochrome woodcuts derived from photographs she took at Chaudière Falls the work was installed according to the art the artist's direction framed and tightly hung with the lines created by the water's surface aligned creating a focal point for the viewer's eye Beaumd Gartner told me that she had wished to create what she terms a nice work her rendition of the glittering waterfall rising spray and the pool's turbulent surface is indeed very aesthetically pleasing yet the work stimulates anxiety as well as pleasure in the viewer even if they are unaware that they are looking at a site of environmental degradation the water cascades down relentlessly conjuring up the sonic sensation of a deafening roar for Beaumd Gartner the experience of viewing the waterfall evoked the terrifying image of the earth opening up and swallowing the water the sequence of woodcuts sorry I'm trying to move on but the sequence of asking you to I'll just keep going the sequence of woodcuts yes please if we can just move on to the next slide and I'm actually going to wrap up here and truncate my talk the sequence of woodcuts immediately reminded me of the spectacular Leber studio and print Fools of the Clyde based on a drawing Turner had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802 on top left and categorised as EP the drawing was entitled the fall of the Clyde Lanarkshire noon Vidae Aikensides hymn to the niads and Mark Aikensides perm of 1746 the nymph personified the generative powers of environmental nature the Clyde and this is a photograph from last week's a pleasant article on the autumnal tourism in Britain the Clyde is now notorious as are many other rivers in Britain for its pollution from sewage and in our new taxonomy of environmental degradation the category excremental pastoral might be to might be more apposite bone gardener's prints like stibbons might be classified as representative of a new 21st century category of aesthetic experience the Anthropocene sublime thank you three wonderful papers we've got some comments and we've got a question for Greg but first I just want to ask a question and I think maybe we'll go to five pasts so make your responses brief panellists if you can a question for each of you about process because it seems to me that with each of the series that you've spoken about the question of process is as important as the finished product and so a very simple question in these series and the individual works within them be appreciated independently from consideration of process or is process intrinsic to our understanding and our appreciation of these works can I start yeah sure why not I think they can and what I didn't mention in my very brief account of the historiography of the Libra is that there is also a strong strand of literature that was concerned with more sort of formalist readings of the plates so they can be read thus but for me the process is really intrinsic and one of the remarkable things about the series is that there were many many engravers proof so I didn't have time to go into that Turner was supervised with sort of megalomaniac sort of scrutiny they're up to kind of 10-12 prints which he frequently annotated and sent back to the engraver who's a very hard task master and we can learn so much as John Gage noted we learned so much from those proofs actually about Turner's processes more generally because he was so secretive generally about his working processes for me you know these are not right yeah it's not a stable series in terms of its you know collation if you like but also the images were constantly changing and Turner would frequently amend the copper plates when they're actually at the printers and he would tinker around with the plates and he continued to mess around with them decades later so I feel that we have to bring the process to bear on and there isn't even a sort of final product really but on the images of the works that we see great thank you go ahead Greg go ahead Greg oh sorry I think process is inscribed into the production of the Paris Fuse in the sense that we see them in production Gertin produces his soft ground etchings as an autograph process which are then added to and we're invited therefore to consider his process as part of the end product great Tim any thoughts about process well Kotman made a lot of prints lots of watercolours in that period were making all etchings Kotman's tend to be large scale the textures the way that he creates tone and variety I think is spectacular I mean even the painted watercolour he was absolutely wonderful printmaker and his contribution to the sort of artistic field is unique in that respect may I just add one other thing which is just I think that they're really yeah I mean with all three artists there is and with the contemporary art I've been talking about Christiana and Emma there's also a sort of haptic quality to these works and all the Turner, Kotman and Gertin they all actually worked the plates I think there's something about the relationship between the body and the work which I think is very critical as well great yes fascinating okay I'm going to ask a question for Greg and then I'm going to ask a question for Gillian so the question for Greg is just to paraphrase or to read the end of the question do you think that Hulker officer relationships you can sort of read in the question itself it's quite a long question relationships with particular figures including Madame de Steyle do you think that Hulker officer relationships might have oriented Gertin's aesthetical approach or at least helped Gertin be in contact with French draftsmen and printmaker and printmakers if that makes sense to you I'm sure that Hulker is the conduit through which he makes contact or engages with I didn't want to use the term influence by but engages with French artistic practice however I don't think this was in any sense on an intellectual striking the intellectual level I think Hulker is as interested in practice as Gertin is and I see the influence not in terms of expressing ideas or thoughts about contemporary French practice but in terms of the practice itself I stress the importance of Hulker's role in commissioning prints for his own publication because I think it's from that very practical concern with illustrating the text in his case that he made his contact through to Gertin so I don't think this is a question of connecting Gertin to current thinking, current ideas in French cultural practice I think it's something a little bit more basic than that OK great I'd love to talk to you more about the difference between engagement and influence that's really fascinating. Gillian do you see as an anthropocentric or anthropocinic or somehow as an early product of the anthropocene and of capitalism's need to provide an alternative non-industrial image of the landscape Oh well that's a really fantastic question and if I'd had more time I would have shown some of the images which is really a sort of labour pre-industrial there's one plate that shows the inside of a forge which seems to me very likely an allusion to Right of Derby and there are a few others but Turner seems to have eschewed references to sort of industrial activity but I think probably when he starts on the Leber it is quite early in his career and he is not really producing paintings or drawings of those kinds of subjects we saw during Lizzie Jacqueline's wonderful talk and she showed examples of prints, later prints from the 20s but I don't think it's really till then that he starts to I guess a little bit earlier he does his great drawing of Leeds in 1816 and that seems to signal for me the beginning so I don't think he's necessarily presenting the Leber as that sort of pre-proto anthropocene I think he probably hasn't quite got there but he does not really figure out what to do with industrial landscape and then I think he figures it out and that becomes incorporated into some kind of sublime possibly under the influence of John Martin and other artists but great question thank you I need to think a lot more about that Great and so for Tim what conclusions do you draw from the shared era failure and uncertainty that seems to hang over so many of the print series produced by the periods leading artists including Turner, Constable and Gertin so that's for you Tim Yes I think this idea of producing things in parts is obviously something of a mixed blessing because it enables you to get the things started and it allows you to fall by the wayside if you don't keep up to your own pace and we know that that happened with all of these artists but whether they needed to appear almost over ambitious in order to get a foothold with their subscribers in the first place we don't know whether it was the artists who run realistic works with their subscribers there was a mood that they needed more for their money one needs to look at the economics of these things as well as the artistic side of things and I've also obviously replying to Sarah Molden and other people who've made comments about the success or failure of the antiquities it's a question where we have these print series that are accompanied by a text respectively as was the case with Gottman one needs more examples of reading the texts rather carefully against the images, one needs to do that with Britain and Carter and other people within this antiquarian milieu I think Great okay and so I'm just going to ask one last question and that is for Greg and this is to do with the emptiness of Gertin's foregrounds which according to this conference, this person who's at the end of the conference you clearly find disappointing might be a product either of A the fact that Gertin might have envisaged the foregrounds being populated at the later stage of the production or B that he wished people to enjoy their emptiness and to appreciate the calm handling of light, air and space i.e. to enjoy an atmosphere rather than a series of narratives Yes, I see them in terms of a failure not in relation to them as prints but in relation to them as watercolours what works well in the foreground for a Gertin watercolour doesn't work well I think in the prints I tried to stress that I thought that if the people who were engaged to produce the aquitint had some of his skills for instance in the work of light and shade distribution etc. they may well have worked but quite frankly commercial aquitintes didn't have the sort of skills that Gertin had and so whilst it gives them the prints a very distinctive quality and I actually found them quite haunting because it gives to the these city scenes a slightly surreal quality to my eye which I find perfectly attractive but in comparison with the watercolours where the pattern making in the foreground is of greater setting interest that doesn't hold for me with the prints so I think it's just a case of what works well with the watercolours in the foreground and I think that's a good point to add to the print medium. Wonderful okay well that seems like a really fascinating place to stop. Thank you everybody that was a really really great session I hope that everybody enjoyed it as much as I did but yeah that was wonderful and thank you everyone for attending. Thank you Thank you, goodbye.