Landscape and the Creative Artist

Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Havellandschaft mit Segelbooten, c1898.

The graphic styled art work shown in these three examples was produced by the German artist and designer Walter Leistikow at the very end of the nineteenth century. The seeming simplicity of the artwork belies the intimate and emotive issues produced for and by the creative artist himself.

Leistikow produced a number of landscapes, both through painting and printing. Although spending most of his adult life in Berlin, the artist produced large sections of his work based on the area in which he grew up. His nostalgia for his childhood landscape gives us remembrances of his own character and memories. His perspective on his own familiar landscape gives these pieces a sense of practical and technical reality as they occupied real spaces in the environment. However, they were also imbued with a sense of his own personal time period and the thoughts and feelings that were associated with that specific mental space. This created an important additional perspective, one of almost dreamlike proportions. The landscapes therefore became both emotional and practical, forging a set of specific parameters in time and space that were of the artists own choosing. 

Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Letzte Flugelschlage, 1890s.

In landscape interpretation in general it is perhaps the sense of the manipulation of time and environment that gives artistic creativity its special uniqueness. Whilst an onlooker can no doubt agree that a landscape produced by an artist is a definite, a specific point on the planet that truly exists within the day to day, it is also very much part of the particular and original thought of the artist. The two are not always the same thing and can often diverge and overlap giving the impression that a landscape is both there in real time but also part of an individual's personal, and therefore uniquely manipulated memory, a joining of the physical and the mental.

Sometimes landscape can appear near faultless, as if a photograph. Holding the creative interpretation against the real natural setting sees little difference apart perhaps from the movement of a tree to a better setting, or changing the curve of a shoreline to produce a better effect. However, often it is a matter of emotional content, content that is indelibly wrapped in a number of emotive layers that have to do with issues that are often rooted in a sense of personal belonging, balance, connectedness even with the physical landscape involved. Although these and other issues are not always foreseen by the artist, they are often present in the creative process, and certainly can be seen or felt in the finished piece.

Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Markische Landschaft mit Bauerngehoft und See, c1898.

To observe a landscape interpreted by a creative artist is one thing, to understand the connectedness that that particular artist has imbued into a specific landscape interpretation is another matter entirely. The observer can only be that, an observer. Even if they are familiar with the specific place and even perhaps the time, it will still be a matter of personal emotive issues that colour their own interpretation of the work, rather than a real connectedness with the artist. 

In this way we can admire the landscape work of Leistikow for example, but we can never appreciate the full depth of meaning. We are strangers in an emotional landscape created by the artist, a marriage of one individual to an environment. As long as we are aware of this then it does not really alter our appreciation of the artist's creative work, but it does, in some ways, forever lock us out of the emotionally intimate connectedness that was only his to experience. That he agreed to pass on the more generalised connections to others and in some small way to pass on the experience, is his legacy.

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Stained Glass Window by Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Illustration: Valentine Cameron Prinsep. The Departure of Tristram and Isoude from Ireland, 1862.

The artist Valentine Cameron Prinsep, although having strong links with the Pre-Raphaelites through his friendship with John Millais, as well as with the second generation of romantics through his friendship with Edward Burne-Jones, was relatively independent from both and carved a creatively artistic career for himself supplying work in a range of eclectic though popular styles. However, he is often associated with the broader Victorian romantic movement and can therefore to an extent be classed within the same framework as Burne-Jones for example.

In 1862 he was one of the artists that produced a series of stained glass windows with the theme of the story of Tristram and Isoude. Prinsep was in the company of a range of artists that included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones. Although Prinsep only contributed one of the set of thirteen windows or panels as they were also known, his contribution was valuable as the piece he produced fitted effortlessly into the overall romantic style that the thirteen pieces of work represented.

Prinsep's window shows the departure of Tristram and Isoude from Ireland. The King of Ireland, Anguisshe is pictured to the left, while the couple, Tristram and Isoude, are to the right. Although some have argued that Prinsep's window is a little busy for the format of a stained glass window, particularly as far as the background is concerned, it seems no more so than those produced by Rossetti or Burne-Jones for example.

Although stained glass was the discipline used, fine art was very much to the forefront. All of the windows were produced by professional fine artists, apart from those added by William Morris. Morris also oversaw the thirteen panels making sure that they all carried correspondingly similar motifs or other forms which would give the story some form of continuity. However, it is still a matter of each panel or small series having the creative signature of the individual artist, which must have concerned Morris whose task it was to reign in any obvious tangential movement away from the story line and to maintain overall harmony within the thirteen pieces.

It would be interesting to know whether any of the artists involved had any appreciation or experience in stained or painted glass production. It seems unlikely although Burne-Jones was to produce significant amounts of stained glass work over his career, very often for Morris and Co. 

Interestingly, it not always a good idea for an artist or designer to have pre-knowledge of another discipline as sometimes not knowing the rules of the specific and unfamiliar discipline can allow any number of freeing ideas and scenarios. It is also a case that those who profess to think outside of the framework of a discipline that they are trained in only find themselves working within a slightly larger framework. It often takes someone from a completely different discipline to point out an even larger framework in which to work. 

This is not to say that Prinsep's work was particularly revolutionary as far as stained glass design was concerned. However, Victorian stained glass work although the culmination, to a large extent, of the rediscovering of the practicalities and technical knowledge of the discipline, much of which had been largely disbanded and forgotten in the eighteenth century, did take on a different feel from that of the sixteenth century back to the medieval. The Victorian era did not produce as much pseudo-medievalism as is sometimes thought. In fact, much of the Victorian take on medievalism is now seen as a particular and distinct style of its own with little to actually connect it with the original medieval. This may well not have been the intention of at least some of the purveyors of nineteenth century medievalism, but is often inevitable.

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