For the first time, I have read a coffee table book from cover to cover: Brian Lukacher’s Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England. Gandy was an artist at the awkward turn of the 18th century – awkward for the arts, at least – when rationalism began to lose its moorings.
Imagine you were living through a deterioration of Google and Wikipedia and had to look for information from a rash of small quirky start-ups. Their search engines are erratic, their reliability is dubious, and each one seems to have its own specialization. What used to pass as true (that is, “probably pretty accurate”) has broken up into masses of competing data. Information has become soft. Whether Napoleon was born in Ajaccio in August 1768 or in a lightning storm on the summit of Monte Cinto on New Years Day, 1770, becomes as much a matter of opinion as whether he was a tyrant or a savant.
Some users in this hypothetical befuddled period are sticking with Google and Wikipedia even though they have become outdated and spotty. Others settle on default search engines that suit their personal inclinations. A small number build their own search engines which, as you can imagine, severely limit their world views. Occasionally, one of this group is inspired and skilled enough for his or her site to become the default search engine for other users.
Eventually, in twenty or thirty years, all these diverse information sources will merge into one huge Google replacement, but you are stuck in the here and now of internet chaos.
Imagine you were living through a deterioration of Google and Wikipedia and had to look for information from a rash of small quirky start-ups. Their search engines are erratic, their reliability is dubious, and each one seems to have its own specialization. What used to pass as true (that is, “probably pretty accurate”) has broken up into masses of competing data. Information has become soft. Whether Napoleon was born in Ajaccio in August 1768 or in a lightning storm on the summit of Monte Cinto on New Years Day, 1770, becomes as much a matter of opinion as whether he was a tyrant or a savant.
Some users in this hypothetical befuddled period are sticking with Google and Wikipedia even though they have become outdated and spotty. Others settle on default search engines that suit their personal inclinations. A small number build their own search engines which, as you can imagine, severely limit their world views. Occasionally, one of this group is inspired and skilled enough for his or her site to become the default search engine for other users.
Eventually, in twenty or thirty years, all these diverse information sources will merge into one huge Google replacement, but you are stuck in the here and now of internet chaos.
Thomas Gainsborough: Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Now, imagine you are an English artist who has matured on the cusp of the 18th to 19th centuries. Taught by members of the conservative, royally-funded Academy, you are trained in classical realism. Any emotional content in your work is supposed to be in the pastel shade of sentiment. What is more, since it is still the Age of Reason, you regard the rules of painting as irrefutable, almost as scientific truths, which makes their disruption especially disconcerting. (Art students of other eras, before and after, were and will be more aware that what they are being taught is simply fashion.) On completing your academic training, you discover that the customers and patrons who were to be your bread and butter have moved on from the Enlightenment’s certainties. They are bored with skilled renditions of reality; they are looking for work that engages them emotionally. They have read Edmund Burke’s essay on the beautiful and the sublime and they are in the mood for the sublime. (According to Burke’s the Beautiful and the Sublime for Dummies, the source of beauty is attraction and the source of the sublime is fear; the emotion that Burke refers to as “terror,” in reference to the sublime, we can translate as “awe.”)
Benjamin West: Lear and Cordelia Some of your contemporaries decide to cling to classical academic principles and paint for a conservative niche market of elderly aristocrats. If they are good enough, they come under the wing of the Royal Academy’s Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West.
John Constable: Wivenhoe Park, Essex Many of your fellow artists join one of the new schools of painting. Some follow Constable and take their easels outside and paint landscapes. These they imbue with appeals to stronger emotions than just sentiment through the heightening of meteorological details.
Henry Fuseli: Adam and Eve Others are drawn to Fuseli and, while maintaining classical realism, paint images which are not exactly polite, with dark, opaque backgrounds. The unsettling images and the murk that surrounds them, in which anything can be imagined, provide the wanted post-classical emotional frisson. And then there are a few painters who develop their own individual styles. Most of these are so idiosyncratic that they cannot find an audience.
J. M. W. Turner: Rain Steam and Speed Among these originals, however, is one genius, J. M. W. Turner, whose audience will outlast him by centuries.
Eventually, in twenty or thirty years, all these diverse aesthetics will merge into Romanticism, but you are stuck in the here and now of artistic chaos.
Eventually, in twenty or thirty years, all these diverse aesthetics will merge into Romanticism, but you are stuck in the here and now of artistic chaos.
G. B. Piranesi: The Pyramid of Caius Cestius Joseph Gandy trained as an architect; his paintings, watercolors mostly, are architectural drawings. During the convention-blurring transitional period in which he worked, architectural drawing – for probably some very interesting reason involving the strange and wonderful work of Piranesi – was an accepted genre at the Royal Academy, like portraiture, historical painting, and landscape, although a minor one. This causes confusion when it comes categorizing Gandy. Was he an artist or an architect? The question vexed him, too.
Joseph Gandy: Imaginary Ancient Architecture on a River Because architectural drawing was considered an art form, rendering imaginary architecture was not what it would be considered among architects today, a pastime, but was deemed as proper an occupation for an architect as designing and building real structures – although, obviously, not as rewarding. This was Gandy’s métier. Every year he exhibited at the Academy and his pictures received serious critical attention.
Joseph Gandy & John Soane: Monumental Western Gateway to London Gandy became involved with another architectural visionary, John Soane, who hired Gandy to render his designs for both real and imagined building projects. Although Soane was a working architect, he subscribed to a rather impractical architectural dogma that called for grandiose structures of an exalted eclectic classicism that reflected the majesty of a British Empire whose imperial future had become secure with the defeat of Napoleon. (It rankled both Soane and Gandy that the French who, after all, were the losers in the war, had a more magnificent capital.)
Soane and Gandy formed a benign and productive folie à deux, whose view of what was classical architecture eventually went further and further back in time and ranged further and further geographically, until they were able to see the grandeur not only in an Egyptian pyramid, but in an African’s semi-circular hut and even an ant-hill. Although they were not alone in promoting a fantastic universalized architecture, Soane – because of his reputation as a practical architect (his great project was the decade-long construction of The Bank of England) – and Gandy – because of his renown as an architectural draftsman (he was quite the celebrity among aficionados) – were taken seriously.
A transitional period, such as the turn of the 18th century, invites experiments in originality which are not called for and, indeed, are discouraged in periods with more stable artistic protocols. In English painting, the 18th century original who lives on as a master is Turner. Like Turner’s, Gandy’s work was groundbreaking enough to be widely excoriated and affective enough to be appreciated by a happy and influential few of connoisseurs. Unlike Turner, although Gandy spoke eloquently enough to many of his contemporaries, to subsequent generations he was just a curiosity and eventually was relegated, unjustifiably, to the limbo of being of only academic interest.
Soane and Gandy formed a benign and productive folie à deux, whose view of what was classical architecture eventually went further and further back in time and ranged further and further geographically, until they were able to see the grandeur not only in an Egyptian pyramid, but in an African’s semi-circular hut and even an ant-hill. Although they were not alone in promoting a fantastic universalized architecture, Soane – because of his reputation as a practical architect (his great project was the decade-long construction of The Bank of England) – and Gandy – because of his renown as an architectural draftsman (he was quite the celebrity among aficionados) – were taken seriously.
A transitional period, such as the turn of the 18th century, invites experiments in originality which are not called for and, indeed, are discouraged in periods with more stable artistic protocols. In English painting, the 18th century original who lives on as a master is Turner. Like Turner’s, Gandy’s work was groundbreaking enough to be widely excoriated and affective enough to be appreciated by a happy and influential few of connoisseurs. Unlike Turner, although Gandy spoke eloquently enough to many of his contemporaries, to subsequent generations he was just a curiosity and eventually was relegated, unjustifiably, to the limbo of being of only academic interest.
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