Artists on the Channel Shore

A review of Coasting: Turner and Bonington on the Shores of the Channel and Finisterre at Nottingham Castle

Throughout the run of Coasting: Turner and Bonington on the Shores of the Channel the sound of the sea surged through the exhibition gallery at Nottingham Castle. Its source was the soundtrack of Finisterre, a video by the young London-based Spanish artist Gemma Pardo, shown as a continuous projection in an adjacent room. It was commissioned jointly by Film and Video Umbrella and the Castle specifically to accompany the exhibition, and the result was perhaps the most effective bringing together of historical and contemporary work since Mariele Neudecker’s simultaneous video records of sunrise and sunset were shown alongside  paintings by Turner at the Tate in 2004. 

Pardo first attracted attention with her video Congo at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in 2007, a work that, like her new piece, combined images of a tidal shore with glimpses of industry. The proposal for Finisterre was already under consideration as a project for Film and Video Umbrella before Nottingham Castle became involved, though the artist reportedly then became excited by the implications of the new context for her work. But Finisterre is all the more compelling for not being conceived as a self-conscious dialogue with Turner. Neither does it make any easy claim to offer a modern equivalent to his vision by using a new visual technology. The structure she has adopted for her film, however, makes it singularly appropriate as a companion piece to Coasting. It is divided into two sections of equal length: an elemental first part filmed on a rocky shore contrasting with a second half full of indications of industry and modern maritime activity. This is a neat echo of the suggestion in Coasting that artists in the early nineteenth century tended to perceive the French coast as timeless and picturesque, and the south coast of England as dynamic and progressive.

Gemma Pardo; 'Finisterre', 2008 (film still) Courtesy the artist

Coasting was laid out so that representations of the two opposing shores faced each other across the gallery, a clear majority of the exhibits being on the French side, while the dialogue between Turner and Bonington gave the show a further level of coherence. Turner was at first a model and inspiration for the younger artist, although he was later briefly tempted by the sudden prestige of Bonington’s channel shore pictures to have another go at the idiom himself. Unfortunately, the paintings that would best demonstrate this phase were not available for loan, though the marvellous Calais Sands from Bury Art Gallery is reproduced in the catalogue. Ultimately, what emerges from this selection is just how distinct, even incompatible, their artistic positions actually were: Turner filling up his pictorial spaces with an increasingly dense imagery, Bonington stripping his right down in order to concentrate on a dazzling handling of surface. The dominant theme in the pictures of both artists here is that of the fish market on the shore, but there are also suggestions of markets of an illicit sort - the lucrative black economy of smuggling. And behind all this, though hardly visible to the eye, lie new developments in the art market itself, enterprises in the expanding field of the printed image that so attracted Turner and new showcases for talent on both sides of the channel that Bonington exploited so astutely. 

Two of these fish market subjects serve to bring out the contrasting character of the artists, the English and French coasts, and the successive phases of war and peace particularly vividly. In Turner’s St Mawes at the Pilchard Season, the sea has evidently yielded up a staggering bounty, and the pilchards are scattered everywhere in a silvery excess. But this is the time of the French wartime economic blockade, and there is no longer a market for the catch: the fish are being dumped on the beach to be sold off as fertilizer. It is a painting of unprofitable glut, and the crowding fisher folk look sombre and peaky, figures in straightened circumstances indifferent to the grandeur of their setting.

J.M.W. Turner, St Mawes at the Pilchard Season, exhibited 1812, oil on canvas. Tate; part of the Turner Bequest

Bonington’s jewel-like French Coast with Fishermen is in complete contrast. This is in some ways the key picture of the exhibition, a historically significant work around which the whole project has been constructed. It has always been notoriously difficult to match Bonington’s surviving pictures with the record of those he is known to have exhibited during his lifetime. However, it now looks fairly certain that this painting can be identified not only with one he showed at the legendary ‘English Salon’ in Paris in 1824, but also with that marking his first appearance in London at the British Institution exhibition in 1826. No painting could stand more neatly for the new kind of artistic exchange between France and England in the period after the Napoleonic wars. And no painting better exemplifies the appeal of Bonington’s approach: a scene so picturesque it could be anywhere, with a group of fisher folk set against a luminous expanse of sky and beach, standing around a gloppy pile of deep-sea catch, all rendered with an effortless virtuosity. 

 Turner is well represented as a watercolourist here, although mostly by preparatory work for projects for engraved series such as The English Channel or La Manche or his impressions of the Seine estuary for his Annual Tour. The first of these never materialized in its intended form: in a terrific essay in the exhibition catalogue, Ian Warrell undertakes a meticulous reconstruction of the work that was done before the scheme was abandoned. For all the ravishing beauty of these colour studies, however, they hardly convey much of a sense of the dense, complex and allusive sort of image towards which Turner was working. But in what is arguably the most impressive watercolour in the exhibition, Fish Market at Hastings, he seems to push inventiveness to the point of eccentricity. Here, the usual, even predictable, group of fishermen and women is enlivened by the addition of other figures who look bizzarely out of place. 

It was a common enough trope of fish market scenes to introduce some piquant social contrasts. So in John Crome’s Fish Market at Boulogne, for example, we see some alarmingly broad-in-the-beam fishwives next to decidedly foppish types, presumably by way of commenting on two extremes of the native character. In his Hastings Turner also includes fashionably dressed figures among a rougher local crowd. Their bonnets, trimmings and silhouettes are so exaggerated that the scene resembles one of those fashion shoots in which the models are posed alongside horny-handed locals. But it is the two figures in Greek national costume that stand out even more conspicuously. What are these latter-day counterparts of Ulysses doing on this alien shore, and in the very place most closely associated with a nation’s experience of a defining foreign invasion?

Turner is presumably making an allusion to the plight of contemporary Greeks, whose representatives were at this time seeking support in Britain and France for their struggle against their Ottoman overlords. Interpreted in this light, Britain is now a secure bastion of liberty, and can be encouraged to reach outwards to help a less fortunate people achieve their own freedom. Turner would make a further reference to the Greek cause in his watercolour of Nottingham itself, now appropriately in the permanent collection of the Castle, though not of course included in the present exhibition. In this view, a vessel sailing on the canal beneath the castle rock is flying the Greek flag, on the face of it incongruously enough. But David Brown, curator of Coasting, is surely mistaken to suggest in his catalogue essay that ‘this can only be because Nottingham was Bonington’s birthplace’. While Bonington had undoubtedly associated himself in Paris with the cause of the Greeks, there is no reason to suppose that Turner could have known this, or to assume that he thought of Nottingham in connection with the young artist. A far more likely explanation is the town’s association with Byron, the most celebrated advocate of Greek independence.

Any opportunity to see Turner face to face with Bonington is bound to be fascinating, although the dialogue (or confrontation, if you prefer) inevitably risks showing either one of them at a disadvantage. David Brown’s commentary goes to the nub of the problem: he points out that Bonington resisted the French demand for idealized landscape, but was not tempted to follow Turner with his multiple perspectives, fragments of narrative, enigmatic symbols and detailed social observation, such as we see in the paintings of St Mawes and Hastings. Brown remarks that Bonington’s pictures ‘seem to deny the very idea of subject’. We can put it another way: that while it may have been Turner who was once accused of painting ‘pictures of nothing, and very like’, it was Bonington who seemed to make painting nothing his mission.

There is one exceptional Bonington picture, however, at least according to the interpretation offered here. This is The Undercliff, one of the gems of the Castle’s own watercolour collection, and already lent a certain prestige by the inscription on the back in his mother’s hand affirming that it was the last thing he ever painted. The overhanging chalk cliffs have been identified as those near Dieppe, and the figures in the middle distance as smugglers awaiting the landing of contraband. But there is a further suggestion in the catalogue that there is an autobiographical note here too, since the artist’s father may have been implicated in the smuggling of lace-making machinery into France when the family emigrated in 1817. It is even claimed that the picture could be seen as a review of the artist’s whole life and loyalties, a recollection of how he and his mentor Louis Francia smuggled the English style of watercolour to the French shore in the first place. The prominent seated, slightly slumped figure in the left foreground, placed just above where the signature and date appear as if scratched into the sand, now becomes the figure of the artist himself, worn out by overwork and alone beneath a portentously darkening sky. All this might simply remind us, however, of a point made by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, when he showed how a painting such as Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows can be charged with the wrong sort of meaning by the addition of a caption saying that this is the last picture the artist painted before he died. Whether or not we are willing to accept this tragic interpretation of The Undercliff, once the claim has been made it will be difficult to see the picture in a neutral light again. 

Richard Parkes Bonington; The Undercliff, 1828, watercolour. Nottingham City Museums and Galleries

The possibility that there might be a narrative underpinning Bonington’s watercolour of cliff and beach brings us back to Pardo’s Finisterre. Could there be some kind of narrative implied in the shift from the first sequence of the film to the second? The relationship between the two halves is richly suggestive. For the first eleven minutes or so, we see the tide coming in on a rocky shore, evidently from the point of view of a fixed camera. At first our view of the cliff beyond and a section of horizon is relatively uninterrupted, but as the waves press in ever more insistently our position is gradually overwhelmed. There are a series of brief glimpses beneath the waters, as if we are experiencing vicariously what it would be like to drown. But as the glimpses of the underwater world become more and more extended, revealing sea-wrack dancing slowly in a blue-green light, a strangely reassuring calm seems to replace those first fearful impressions.

The second sequence reverses the movement of the first, in that we begin beneath the waves and gradually emerge into the air and light. The rocky coast has been replaced by a low-lying estuary, however, and one by one we identify signs of engineering and industry by the waterside, and then various forms of maritime activity. We have returned from the depths of the sea into a mundane environment, but it feels less like a recovery of life than the loss of something indefinable. We have experienced some kind of sea-change, as if in an inverted version of The Tempest. Whereas the shipwrecked protagonists of Shakespeare’s play imagine themselves drowned and recover consciousness on a magical island, here we have lost sight of elemental rock and water in order to be re-born in a grey, unwelcoming mechanical world.

Finisterre, meaning literally the end of the earth, is a powerfully evocative name. Cape Finisterre marks the westernmost point of Spain in Pardo’s native province of Galicia, and her first idea was to film here and in that other European Finisterre, the most westerly part of Brittany, as well as at Land’s End in Cornwall. In the event, when the commissioning process brought Nottingham’s Coasting exhibition into the frame as well, filming was re-located to the south coast of England and ‘Finisterre’ now signifies not a literal geographical location but a symbolic domain, somewhere at the threshold between land and sea.

The first part of the film was made at Winspit Bay in Dorset, on the Isle of Purbeck. Turner himself had found one of the most striking subjects in his Southern Coast project at Lulworth Cove, just a few miles further west. (In 1826, incidentally, he had ventured as far as the tip of Finisterre in Brittany, the most westerly point in Europe he ever reached in a lifetime of travelling). The second location was a tributary of Southampton Water, a place Turner never seems to have depicted, for all his interest in ports, harbours and shipping. 

Pardo’s project has the effect of complicating in interesting ways some older ideas of identity, place and national allegiance: a Spanish artist making a work on the southern coast of England, the title of which inescapably evokes locations on the opposite shore. In the context of Coasting, this could hardly be more appropriate, since it helps to shift the way we respond to Bonington away from the kind of schematic discussion that has tended to dominate earlier accounts of his work and its influence. Could he be properly regarded as an English or a French artist? Into which school does his work best fit, and which national side could he be said to be playing for? But the world in which we now respond to the theme of the channel coast is no longer as simple as it was in Bonington’s and Turner’s day. Turner at first regarded the south coast of England as a potential theatre of war, and Bonington’s French shore scenes were themselves a sign of a period of renewed commerce and exchange between formerly antagonistic nations. But the channel can no longer be thought of as a clearly demarcated frontier, and it is not the least of the merits of Pardo’s intervention into scenes from an earlier history that it draws attention to this uncertainty.

Coasting: Turner and Bonington on the Shores of the Channel and Gemma Pardo’s Finisterre were at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 15 November 2008 – 15 February 2009