William James Blacklock

Probably, James Leathart, of Gateshead;
Private collection

STRUCTURE Original canvas. There are faint signs of craquelure across the surface, most noticeable to a line from the stretcher bar in the sky; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT Under ultraviolet light there appears to some retouching along the upper half of the right edge and also a small line along the lower edge near the left corner. FRAME Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 5718 if you have any questions about the present work.
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The present Lakeland view by W.J. Blacklock takes its vantage point from the eastern shore of Derwentwater, looking towards the southwest. The white-painted building on the lake shore in the left hand middle distance is the Lodore Hotel, standing close to the foot of the Lodore Falls (which are themselves obscured by the birch trees in the left hand foreground). At the centre, forming a cleft, are the Jaws of Borrowdale – a wooded ravine with steep cliffs on each side – and with the village of Grange out of view beyond. The mountain that stands beyond is Dalehead, which rises to 754meters and with High Stile, beyond Buttermere on the right. This was a view that Turner had recorded in pencil studies made directly from the motif, done in the course of a stay in Keswick in 1797 (see David Hill, Turner in the North, 1996, p.105).        

Blacklock is an important and intriguing figure in the context of nineteenth-century landscape painting – bridging the achievements of Romanticism and the earnest and obsessive innovations of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school. In London, where he lived from 1836, when he was twenty years old, until 1850, and during which period he exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution – generally showing north-country landscapes – he gained a respected position in metropolitan artistic life, his works being admired by Turner, David Roberts, and Ruskin. His eventual return to the North, to Cumwhitton near Brampton where his family were farmers and landowners, at a time when he was presumably attempting to preserve his fragile state of health – both mental and physical – marked the commencement of an extraordinary final burst of creativity, and led to a small but precious group of landscape paintings of which the present example is a fine example. 

As a painter, Blacklock seems to have had a particular fondness for the north-western Lakeland fells, and perhaps based himself on occasions at Keswick. In 1853 he painted the view across the southern end of Crummock Water from the foot of the Loweswater Fells (sold in these rooms, 9 December 2008, lot 107), while the following year he painted Catbells and Causey Pike (Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle), which is a view across Derwent Water. In all of these the atmospheric effect of sunlight and shadow on the mountain forms is beautifully observed. Blacklock's particular mastery depended in great part on his skill and understanding of the constantly fluctuating quality of light, and the scale and structure of the distant ranges are given volumetric expression by the graduated fall of light. Thus the mountain ranges seem both massive and distant, but at the same times almost tangible and allowing close and detailed scrutiny.

Blacklock had a particular following among Newcastle collectors, probably as a result of his friendship with William Bell Scott. In the early 1850s he received commissions for Lakeland subjects from both William Armstrong and James Leathart; a painting entitled Esthwaite Lake and the Langdale Pikes (sold in these rooms, 13 July 2010, lot 33) that he painted for Armstrong was shown at the Royal Academy in 1855. Of the three works that he painted for Leathart, the last – and which was almost certainly identical with the present work – was unfinished at the time of sending in to the 1855 summer exhibition, as Blacklock reported in a letter to Leathart of 21 March 1855. The indications are that the work occupied him for most of the following summer, and the view shows a late summer landscape with heather in bloom. On 17 September he was in a position to inform his patron that 'in passing through Carlisle on Saturday to the seaside I had your picture and Mr Armstrong's packed and ready to start to Newcastle and hope that you have by this time received them'. He went on to say: 'I have painted them as well as I could neither sparing time nor care in working on them'. (Letters held among the Leathart Papers at the University of British Columbia)

It may reasonably be speculated that Blacklock knew that time remaining to him was limited and that he needed to use all available energy and concentration to produce this work and the one further composition that was to follow. His eyesight was failing and he seems to have been behaving in an increasingly erratic manner, the result it is thought of a syphilitic infection. In November of the same year he was placed by his family in the Crichton Royal Mental Institution in Dumfries, and it was there that he died on 12 March 1858, aged forty-two, as a result of 'monomania of ambition and general paralysis'. CSN