The Savage Frontier by Matthew Carr

Author:Matthew Carr
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620974285
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

Artists

The reimagining of the Pyrenees was not simply due to the written word. From the eighteenth century onward, the Pyrenees attracted a stream of artists and illustrators, whose paintings, engravings, and illustrations provided the wider European public with their first visual impressions of the mountains. Such images featured regularly in French publications such as La nature, Le tour du monde, and L’illustration, and also in books about the Pyrenees, which were often illustrated by their authors. Ramond’s books contained his own sketchings and drawings, as did James Erskine Murray’s and Lady Georgiana Chatterton’s. The French lithographer Louis-Julien Jacottet (1806–80) made the Pyrenees the subject of two albums, Souvenir des Pyrénées (1835–36) and Souvenir des Pyrénées, nouvelle excursion (1841–42). Albert Tissandier’s account of his journeys through the Aragonese and Catalan Pyrenees in 1889 was illustrated with his own immaculately rendered drawings.

Some artists focused on the more dramatic Pyrenean landmarks, such as Gavarnie. Others were attracted by more intimate details and contrasts in the landscape and terrain. In a letter to a friend from the spa town of Eaux-Bonnes in 1845, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) complained that “the beauty of this nature of the Pyrenees is not something that one can hope to capture happily through painting. Regardless of the work that follows, all of it is so gigantic that one does not know where to begin amongst these masses and the multitude of details.”29 Delacroix eventually published a series of drawings and watercolors of the mountains and their inhabitants in an Album des Pyrénées that same year. Gustave Doré visited the Pyrenees on numerous occasions, and both his paintings and the haunting pencil-and-ink drawings of blasted tree trunks, cataracts, and stormy skies that illustrated Taine’s and Blackburn’s travel books contained images that could easily have accompanied Ann Radcliffe’s imagined Pyrenees.

Franz Schrader’s Pyrenean paintings tended to focus on the shapes and shades of rocks and mountains, in keeping with his belief that art, cartography, and the study of topography were complementary pursuits.30 The Parisian artist and engraver Charles Jouas (1866–1942) was known largely as a painter of Parisian opera sets before presenting himself to the writer and publisher Henri Béraldi in 1896. Béraldi was so impressed with his work that he promptly dispatched him to Luchon to come up with the illustrations to accompany 100 Years of the Pyrenees. Jouas subsequently made numerous visits to the Pyrenees, and these visits transformed the urban artist into the quintessential “illustrator of the Pyrenees,” whose elegant and deftly drawn sketches and watercolors focus on people as well as landscape, from shepherds sitting in front of fires to courting couples skipping down mountain paths and teams of roped men and women walking up through the snow-covered ridges.

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