The English Picturesque and Dutch Landscape
Prints of
the Seventeenth Century
March
11 to July 30, 2004
The English Picturesque and Dutch Landscape Prints of the
Seventeenth Century exhibition presented a remarkable selection of etchings, engravings,
and mezzotints – some of the most accomplished prints ever made. With this
exhibition, the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre announced the outstanding future donation to the University of Guelph Art Collection of more
than 500 prints – a promised gift from Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R.
Alexander Brink, OAC 1919 and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, Mac DHE 1921.
Alex
and Edith knew each other in Woodstock as high school students before they came
to study on the Guelph campus. They
were married in 1922 and moved to Madison, Wisconsin where Alex began a
life-long affiliation with the University of Wisconsin.
He devoted his life to improving agriculture through the application of
genetic science and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Although the Brinks spent the majority of their lives in the United
States, Alex and Edith were very proud of their Canadian heritage. They visited
their Canadian relatives often and they even kept their Guelph college ice
skates in an old trunk as a special memory.
Art
Centre Director Judith Nasby commented, “The Brink Collection has been
methodically assembled through the eye of an astute scholar of prints.
It is comprehensive in its scope and spans five centuries, as well as
providing rare and in depth holdings by numerous artists such as Claude Lorrain
and Anton Waterloo. The future donation of this important collection will help
establish the Art Centre as a leading site for the study of prints.”
This
exhibition brought together prints which are appealing in themselves and also
make a historical point. The prints
in this exhibition – etchings, engravings, and mezzotints – comprised some of the
most accomplished ever made. The
English prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are vintage examples
of graphic art at its best. The
Dutch prints are amongst the high accomplishments of the so-called ‘Golden
Age’ when the northern Renaissance reached its acme.
In that era, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of copies of such prints
circulated, but today few survive. Those
that do are seldom seen outside museum collections.
The
historical point was that the eighteenth century English Picturesque movement
that brought discerning tourism to a new level and produced so many landscape
gardens was, in part, derived from Dutch visual stimuli.
Along with the recognized Italianate sources, represented here in the
work of Nicholas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Salvator Rosa, seventeenth century
Dutch landscape art had a strong appeal to the English sensibility. It
featured unembellished rural life not unlike that across the channel.
Ordinary Dutch agrarian and village scenes, including farming folk and
animals, heightened English awareness of their own countryside.
As people migrated towards towns and cities, and hence to expansion
overseas, the taste grew for rural memorabilia.
Netherlands artists recorded passing features of rural life, while in
England the ‘Picturesque’ was a last look at broad features of the
landscape, and at rural life, before the industrial revolution altered the
terrain and the rural mentality forever. Both
sets of graphics are filled with loving attention to endangered ways of life.
They help to remember a lost world scarcely imaginable today.
On Tuesday, March 16 at 12:30 p.m., Judith Nasby introduced The Brink Collection during a dessert reception to mark the opening of the exhibition The English Picturesque and Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century.
To further celebrate The Brink Collection, the
Art Centre published an illustrated thirty-six page catalogue with an
introduction by Andrew Brink
and full documentation of the fifty-seven prints in the exhibition.
The works were selected by Andrew Brink who also contributed to the
catalogue essay. The
exhibition and catalogue were presented with the support of the Ontario
Arts Council.
