Local Heroes

Despite praise from the poet John Clare, the novelist Thackeray, and the nineteenth century’s major art critic, Ruskin, Peter de Wint remains an elusive figure, emerging at most from his wife Harriet’s ‘Memoir’. Even his birthplace is controversial, (Hanley has been suggested as well as Stone).

However, he is a major painter; and, in my opinion, for him to be so neglected in his home county of Staffordshire is shameful. There is no memorial to him in the county, and there is only the one painting kept here in the county – at the City Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent, where it is kept mostly in storage. The one major gathering of his work locally took place in 1984, when the City Art Gallery organised a bi-centenary exhibition.

A blue plaque at the site of his birth at 35 High Street, Stone was removed some time ago. It is not clear to me why.

If I have a wish, it is to urge one of our local galleries to create a permanent display of the life of a great local son (copies are not expensive!!!). This would not just be for his, but also the county’s greater cultural fame!

Origins

Peter’s doctor father, of Dutch origin - but part raised in the American colonies -, married a London girl whilst training there. This outraged his father, who cut him out of an inheritance. The doctor’s travels to secure a practice brought him to Stone, where he settled for life.

Professional and family ties were close with mid-Staffs, and so I believe this was also where their baby boy, Peter, was born, in 1784. Tantalisingly, his wife claims Hanley, but, till more facts emerge, I claim Stone!

But the place of birth is, in fact an irrelevance because DeWint, who was art-obsessed all his life, had no interest in the ongoing Industrial Revolution, or the pottery trades. He only painted one major such ‘industrial’ picture ‘Stockport – and this was for commission (and even there, a farming scene intrudes into the corner!)

© 2003 Southampton City Art Gallery

He left mills and furnaces to those interested in socio-economic change. He was a social conservative, whose love was for the apparently contented face of the farmed country scene. He must have enjoyed and wandered the Trent meadows, for his best works are of gentle river landscapes, low hills and the Midlands’ subtly changing lowlands.

Artist

His father accepted Peter’s lack of interest in a medical career, and consented to art training, initially with Mr Rogers of Stafford (who had exhibited at the Royal Academy).
Afterwards, through connections with a leading Uttoxeter artistic family, Peter was recommended to study with its London representative, John Raphael Smith. This student career (from 1802) was a form of apprenticeship or artistic indenture. Like a craftsman, he would learn skills and techniques, but also make social contacts in the art world, which was rapidly changing.

I am personally fascinated that whilst most contemporary painters came from a background of “trade” (like Constable, a wealthy miller’s son), the DeWints had pretensions to a gentry lifestyle and social connections - even though the Doctor never, apparently, gained his “old money” inheritance.

Peter’s new tutor Smith was a portraitist who would have made Peter aware that such art was the best way to wealth and even glory (example Sir Joshua Reynolds, the famous 18th century President of the Royal Academy, and also a provincial incomer from Devon). But Peter had other ideas; he mixed with the wider art circles of London, featuring the new art-idol Turner and many others. There, landscape painting was what gripped our Stone artist.

After a few years he amicably split from Smith, and was (in lieu) to supply him with a number of landscapes, presumably for Smith to sell on.

Constable's friendship

Dr DeWint must have been gratified that, at his death in 1807, Peter was making his way as an independent artist, with acquaintanceship and encouragement of men like the soon-to-be-famous John Constable, who was only 8 years older and trying, also, to break into the art world.

Curiously, both men were socially conservative. Both lived for gentle, unexciting lowland and riverside painting but both were very radical and innovative in their brushwork, and handling of painterly design. Particularly their unfinished sketches in watercolour or oil show their astonishing flair at the same creative moment.

They never worked together, but comparisons are fascinating!

The Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester quite recently bought an early DeWint oil sketch, a brilliant, well observed study of grasses and weeds which showed a new painterly relationship with the ordinariness of nature; here we may see him as the would-be equal of Constable, or of Europe’s landscape painter wunderkind, their German contemporary, Caspar David Friedrich (the National Gallery has, interestingly, by the way, recently bought its first picture by him).

All three painters took the mundane and translated it into the new Romanticism.

© Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Choices

Crucially, however, although developing oil painting skills like Constable and Friedrich, DeWint chose to focus his career on watercolours. Why was this?

If a clear decision there was, it occurred around the time of his marriage in 1810, to Harriet, the sister of his friend and (more minor) fellow painter William Hilton, when he had the accompanying need for a reliable income.

We need to note a few but vital art-historical facts: only recently had landscape painting become a saleable art form in itself, especially for home-grown artists.
Constable honoured the Welshman Richard Wilson, not long dead, as “the father of our landscape tradition”; and the quite recently deceased Gainsborough (who created some superb landscapes, often for himself) complained bitterly of being chained to painting portraits because they brought ready cash.

Young radicals like the well travelled Turner were making many and profitable sales with both oils and watercolours.

Watercolour societies were set up to promote the many artists in this new wave, to organise exhibitions, and promote contact with patrons, who now included members of the wealthy middle classes.

There was, simply, much work to be had, and Peter, not particularly successful in oil painting sales, plumped, in the main, for watercolour landscapes (though not all watercolourists painted landscapes, of course!)

Watercolours

Work on a watercolour could be done productively and quickly, using his well loved out of doors preparatory sketches. Watercolours could be sold on quickly or be paid for by commission, and it was now a highly respected art.

Peter always loved teaching, and enjoyed contacts with gentry and aristocracy. These two pleasures could be combined with engagements, often long, at country houses with amateur pupils, and thus Peter had many comfortable free working holidays around the country. Probably his wife, with whom he enjoyed a happy and successful life, accompanied him.

Such clientele included the Leverson-Gowers, the family of the soon-to-be Dukes of Sutherland, so visits to the family’s Trentham estate and to Lillieshall were probably a pleasant necessity, giving a chance to visit family, friends and roots.

His mature professional life was therefore of some considerable comfort.

In the search for success, he had left Staffordshire; he eventually settled in Lincoln (near the final stretch of the River Trent, of course!). But in his paintings, I think you can see that he never forgot the landscape that he was surrounded by as a boy.

Success

So why were his pictures so collectable, as they still are today?

Together with his still life pieces and working groups of farm labourers (types of painting pioneered by his Dutch ancestors in the 17th century), his best landscapes have a very accessible intimacy, and make the ‘ relatively ordinary’ attractive, even unforgettable or magical.

For example, his last great work, completed just months before his death, shows cattle watering on the lovely river Dart in Devon, both preparatory sketches and finished work masterly. This picture was the beautiful poster for the Potteries Museum’s 1984 bicentenary exhibition.

Such scenes he endlessly reworked, like one called Salt Hill, Windsor, above the Thames. I know this picture so well from gallery study; it could be my own home view of cows watering at a woody bend of the Trent. The likeness, to me, is astounding.

Nostalgia for home

Such pictures as ‘Salt Hill’ naturally have a strong appeal of home and nostalgia, and it’s interesting that apparently his earliest landscape to survive is of Tutbury Castle above the River Dove, only 20 miles away from his native River Trent.

In fact, he painted the Trent as it runs in its final grandeur from Nottingham into Lincolnshire all his life! Never with high drama, or fashionable creepy ruins; it was windmills, old barns and bridges in scenes of working life were his and his public’s taste.

He was an associate of poetic circles (especially that of Keats) in fashionable London, where he maintained a house till his death there, though he was not close to the poet John Clare, who so praised him. Clare, from the agricultural lower class, had experienced hard country labouring, and was socially critical; DeWint preferred to dwell on nature’s bounty, not on real life farm work in its toil, and its often unsanitary home life!

DeWint’s art is direct, instantly recognisable, and needs no cultural foreknowledge
But it is subtle; he played with natural beauty, deftly rearranging nature, using broad confident brush-work and colour washes (in fact, seeming to encourage the random play of water and colour).

He made good designs, and used a modern-looking range of real life countryside colour tones. He certainly owed a debt to the countryside of his native Mid-Staffordshire in his gentle, reflective form of Romantic art.

He was no culture-shattering painter, unlike Picasso in our times, or Turner in his. Peter’s own scale of work and lower ambition nonetheless captured a unique moment - when England was for the last time a truly rural nation, with a population mainly on, and working for, the land.

Just after his death, population and work statistics showed, as for ever after, a nation dominated by an urban, industrial outlook.

©Crown copyright: UK Government Art Collection

The beauties of the countryside

Many of us “townies” (though in reality DeWint was one too, of course) love our real ales at a country pub, looking out on a satisfying scene. So it was for Peter’s contemporary, the author of ‘Vanity Fair’, Thackeray, who wrote:

"...One might have called for a pot of porter at seeing one of DeWint’s haymakings….everything basked lazily for him!..."

And yes, Beauty and Nostalgia were his things, and why not? Our age has just as much ugliness, which we have much more difficulty than avoiding than in his day.

He died and was buried in London in 1849, just before the Great Exhibition of 1851 elevated all things industrial. His mourners attested to a happy creative life and marriage.

To commemorative his close ties with his adoptive home Lincoln, his widow had erected a fine “Victorian Gothic” memorial-tomb in its famous cathedral. It is there to this day, and can be visited; his home can (externally) be viewed from a nearby street, but most of all, his art can be permanently studied in the DeWint Rooms at the city’s acclaimed, very intimate Usher Art Gallery.

The other fine collections of his work are at the Cambridge Fitzwilliam, and at the National Trust’s Sizergh Castle, nr Kendal, Cumbria – where they have the largest on-show private collection, which can be viewed during its opening times.

Copyright - Chris Brookes

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Addendum

A few years ago, the Graves art gallery in Sheffield held an exhibition of British watercolours, which featured a leaflet about the links between DeWint and the well-known rural poet, John Clare. Clare's poem "Sonnet to DeWint" led the piece:

DeWint! I would not flatter, nor would I
Pretend to critic-skill in this, thy art
Yet in thy landscape I can well descry
The breathing hues as nature’s counterpart
No painted peaks, no wild romantic sky
No rocks, no mountains as the rich sublime
Have made thee famous; but the sunny truth
Of nature, that marks thee for all time
Found on our level pastures - spots forsooth
Where common skill sees nothing deemed divine
Yet here a worshipper was found- in thee
And thy young pencil worked such rich surprise
That rushy flats, befringed with willow trees
Rivalled the beauties of Italian skies

Although overly “Romantic” in tone, this reflected what many felt (and still do!) about the inherent poetry in DeWint’s art.