JOHN GLOVER AND EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE IV

'Like the industrious Bee, he (Glover) has wandered over the fields of Art and enriched himself with her treasures'

As well as capturing the Picturesque rural landscape, Glover was skilful at rendering architectural form. His sketchbooks show images of York, Chester, Newcastle and Durham as well as various ruined castles and abbeys. Later, in Van Diemen’s Land, he made several house portraits of the recently built colonial homes of rural settlers.

In his depiction of the great metropolis of London, he tended to favour the greener fringes (‘Greenwich’ (cat. no. 37), Hampstead and Harrow), however his ‘Thames near St. Paul’s Cathedral’ (cat. no. 28), shows him working at London’s centre.

In accordance with the fashionable British Romantic enthusiasm for Greek culture and ‘exotic’ places, Glover painted ‘View of Mount Olympus and Town of Brusa’, 1813 (cat. no. 33). Glover was alert to the needs of the market, and though having gained well financially from the sale of his landscape watercolours, he diversified into oils in the 1810s. At times he employed Biblical and Classical subjects for these works. He exhibited at the 1814 Paris Salon, and was awarded a Gold Medal by Louis XVIII for ‘Paysage Composé, Bergeres en Repos’. During his Italian Tour of 1818, Glover sketched extensively at Tivoli, in the hills outside Rome, returning to this subject again and again. Glover’s solo exhibitions, (the first in 1820), also received critical acclaim; ‘Tivoli’, 1820 (cat. no. 42) attracting particular praise..

Throughout the 1820s, Glover remained a consistent and prominent presence in the British art scene. He did not slow down, journeying to Scotland in 1825, the Isle of Wight in 1826, and Ireland in 1827, enthusiastically engaging with further aspects of the landscape of the British Isles.

Activities and Discussion Points:

cat. nos. 16, 38 & 45:

Search for a really old building in your district.

Sketch details in your visual diary (or sketchbook) — include shapes of windows, doors, mouldings etc.

Make rubbings of various surfaces of the building.

Compose an imaginary castle or fantasy structure by using the cut-out rubbings and drawings and place it in a ‘Glover-like’ setting (e.g. cat. no. 45)

Look at the work of Hieronymous Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Edward Hopper, Jeffrey Smart and Leon Kossoff for other examples based on the ‘built environment’.

Consider how tourism promotes ‘places to see’ using the natural local scenery in ‘perfect picturesque post cards’.

Discuss concepts of formatting and editing to make a more ‘pleasing’ view.

Design and make a postcard to send to a friend. (N.B. postage-size limitations may apply in some regions of Australia).

Consider how our use of the word ‘picturesque’ signals our pleasure in recognising how closely the reality of a place can approximate to the ‘ideal’.

Use your viewfinder to isolate and frame sections of a view. Hold it at arms length in your non-drawing hand to do this. Choose the best views to draw and sketch.

Consider the work of Malcolm Morley, (hand-painted Photo Realist works appropriating post-card ‘heroics’), and David Hockney (in particular his photo montages and recent painting: ‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’).