William James Blacklock

S. F. Chance, Clift Hill, Bush-on-Lyne;
Symon Brown;
Private collection

Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Two Cumbrian Painters of the 19th Century – A Fresh Appraisal – William J. Blacklock (1816-1858) Sam Bough (1822-1878), 1981, not numbered (reproduced in the typescript catalogue)

STRUCTURE The canvas has been lined. PAINT SURFACE There is some minor craquelure and light stretcher marks visible. Otherwise in good condition. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are some very minor flecks of cosmetic retouching scattered in the sky area. Otherwise in good condition, clean and ready to hang. FRAME Held in a decorative gold painted composite frame in fair condition.
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William James Blacklock's 1853 painting gives a view across the southern end of Crummock Water in the north-western Lake District. The vantage point was on the lake's western shore at the foot of the Loweswater Fells. Scale Force joins the lake here, and is likely to be the beck seen in the right hand foreground. The view is therefore towards the north east, with Grassmoor at the centre and the somewhat lower peak of Whiteless Pike to the right. The protuberant outcrop seen close to the lake's far shore on the right side is Rannerdale Knotts, at Hause Point.

The early history of the painting is unclear. It does not appear among the lists of Blacklock's exhibited works, nor is it referred to in the artist's correspondence with James Leathart of Gateshead, which commenced in the year in which it was made. It seems not to have been among the group of Lakeland landscapes that the painter made at about this time for Mr Roberson, the artist' colourman. It is nonetheless a celebrated and characteristic painting by perhaps the most remarkable of all painters who have dedicated themselves to the representation of the English Lake District. Included as it was in the seminal exhibition of Blacklock's works (in combination with those of Sam Bough) that Mary Burkett organised at Abbot Hall in 1981, it was then described as a work in which the artist 'catches the warm, dappled light ... in an unbelievable manner. He suggests the sultry heat of a summer's day and the solid mass of mountain as if he were using a lens for accuracy and yet without a trace of pedantry or any exaggeration of form'.

Although hard to place in the evolving pattern of progressive landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century, Blacklock is a most intriguing figure. Born in London, the son of a bookseller and publisher, in 1818 the family returned to Cumberland – in which county they had been established since the 1730s – living at Cumwhitton. Blacklock returned to London in 1836 and lived there until 1850. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution – generally showing north country landscapes – and gained a respected position in metropolitan artistic life, his landscape paintings being admired by Turner and Ruskin among others. He appears to have been no direct contacts with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were in any case much younger than him, but Blacklock would certainly have seen early works exhibited by members of the group and their associates. It is a matter of speculation as what European artists' works he may also have studied, with French painters such as Corot and Courbet sometimes mentioned as the inspiration of his work as a landscape painter.

The most remarkable of his works come from the last four years of his life, after his return to Cumwhitton and all showing the Lakeland fells or neighbouring countryside. This extraordinary surge of creativity was sadly short lived. In 1854 he lost the sight of one eye, while the following year he suffered a mental breakdown and was placed in the Crichton Royal Mental Institution in Dumfries where he died in 1858.
CSN