Richard Parker Bonington: Young and Romantic (Nottingham Castle, till 2 February)
Who is RPB?
Laura Gascoigne
It is not right in a young man to assume great dash — great completion — without study or pains,' complained Constable in a letter of 1830. ' "Labour with genius" is the price the Gods have set on excellence.' The young man under discussion was Richard Parkes Bonington, and Constable's narky tone is down to the fact that while he, at the height of his powers. was struggling to sell paintings, collectors couldn't get enough of RPB. Constable's pique is understandable, though less than generous in view of the fact that his young rival was already dead, having succumbed two years before to tuberculosis brought on by the strains of meeting the demand for his work.
History has rewarded Constable: his 'labour with genius' has earned him a place in the artistic pantheon, where Bonington remains a romantic footnote. Today, the question 'Who is R.P. Bonington?', asked by the Literary Review when the young Anglo-French artist first burst onto the London scene in 1826, might justifiably be echoed by many. In the past 200 years there have been only three major surveys of his work, and despite the Wallace Collection's outstanding holding of 25 paintings (to be the subject of a special display next year) he remains a painter without honour in his own country. Now, on the bicentenary of his birth in 1802, the Castle Museum in his hometown of Nottingham is hoping to put this right with its exhibition Richard Parkes Bonington: Young and Romantic. Having got into the Bonington market relatively late, its collection is stronger in drawings than paintings. But it does include some gems, supplemented here by handsome loans from British public galleries and private lenders, and by paintings by French and English contemporaries, such as Delacroix and Turner.
Compared with Hertford House, Nottingham Castle is a barn, but that's no bad thing for the Bonington lover. Instead of sinking into the Wallace's dimly lit damask, his little oils shine out like jewels from the bright, bare walls, inviting us to peer into their hidden depths and poke about in their dark, neglected corners — which is where, in my feminine experience, you find out what an artist's really made of. Bonington passes the mother-in-law test with flying colours. The show reveals him as a master of neglected clutter, whether the discarded suit of armour dumped under the desk in 'Don Quixote in his Study' or the pile of fishing paraphernalia tucked under the rotting jetty in 'Coast of Picardy, near St-Valery-sur-Somme'. It's all done with shades of brown, but there's no fudging.
The son of a Nottingham drawing master and jail governor turned French-lace manufacturer, Bonington learned watercolouring from his father and art from the Louvre. Here, like other young students in Paris, he copied the masters (and met the young Delacroix doing the same). It was from the Dutch, especially Rembrandt, that he learned the secrets of handling colour out of the spotlight. But unlike Rembrandt, after a spell in the shadows he liked to step outside for a lungful of air. His bright and breezy landcapes, whether or not they are strictly plein air paintings, are full of the stuff, confirming his effort
less mastery of tone from the chiaro to the scuro end of the scale.
'I could never be weary of admiring his marvellous grasp of effects,' wrote Delacroix of his friend in 1861, and they haven't lost their freshness. There's nothing slick about the dash that so riled Constable — it's just natural facility buffed by youthful enthusiasm to a high shine. As a watercolour technician, Bonington has Turner licked: he doesn't only paint in the medium, he draws in it with a brush as firm — and sometimes as dry — as a pencil. And as a colourist, he keeps it clean: next to the sparkling economy of warm and cool contrasts in his Italian paintings such as 'The Castelbarco Tomb, Verona' (1827), Turner's gaudy watercolour of Nottingham (1832) is a gallimaufry. But Bonington could do moody, too, when the mood took him, as he demonstrates in his dramatic 'The Undercliff, showing a band of crossChannel smugglers at dusk loading their boats under a bruised and angry-looking sky. Booze-cruising was so much more romantic in those days.
On the back of this painting is a note by the artist's mother: 'Aug 6th and 7th 1828. The last drawing made by our dear son about prior to his fatal dissolution. Never to be parted with.' Bonington died in London, where his family had rushed him for treatment, a month before his 26th birthday. His whirlwind career had lasted a mere ten years. Would he have gone on to still greater things if he had lived, or would slickness have set in, proving Constable right? On the evidence of this show, he accomplished enough. It's worth a trip to Nottingham to see it because it may be 25 years before the next one, commemorating his death.
An exhibition catalogue is available by post on 0115 9153662, priced £12.95 including p&p. The Wallace Collection will hold a special Bonington display from 23 January to 27
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