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Albert Goodwin

English Landscape Painter
1845 - 1932

Ponte Pietra Verona: 1896

Ponte Pietra Verona: 1896
by Albert Goodwin

The following articles about the Life and Work of Albert Goodwin can be found on the Art Renewal Center's Page and were compiled by Chris Beetles and they are the created work of the cited authors, and I provide them here for a broader understanding of this landscape artist.

Senex Magister

HIS LIFE AND WORK
by Hammond Smith
'It is a great relief in an exhibition like this', wrote the art critic of The Spectator in his review of the RWS Winter Exhibition of 1881, 'which is mainly one of the disciplined skill exerted in somewhat commonplace directions, to turn to pictures like Mr. Goodwin's, wherein the poetic feeling is so strong as to make us forget the technical skill which the artist possesses'.
Albert Goodwin had shown himself to be an artist with an individual vision from an early age, exhibiting his first picture at the Royal Academy, when he was just fifteen years old; and when he was still only nineteen years old, his master, Ford Madox Brown, writing to James Leathart, a patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, praised the work of his young pupil, predicting that 'there can be no doubt of his becoming before long one of the greatest landscape painters of the age'. Although it may be debatable whether Goodwin ever quite attained the pinnacle of distinction predicted by Brown, his work, which has an unmistakable character of its own, has rarely ceased to attract admirers and patrons, of whom the most distinguished was undoubtedly John Ruskin. Moreover, contemporary reviews of his work exhibited at the RWS (Royal Watercolour Society) in the 1870's and 1880's, variously refer to him as being 'the most imaginative member of the society'; as 'still the most interesting of the landscape painters here, and he is almost the only one in whom landscape receives any touch of ideal quality'; and 'he stands quite alone in his power of imparting a touch of fairy influence to his landscapes'.
As a young artist, it was natural that Goodwin should have been attracted to what was considered the avant-garde art of his day, and his early work shows a Pre-Raphaelite concern for detail and for bright, clear color. An important factor in Goodwin's approach to landscape painting, was his belief that it was a kind of religious activity, and that his own talents as a painter were God-given - views not unlike those held by Ruskin and some members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
'Let me not,' he wrote in his Diary,
underestimate the gift God has given me…and in its measure this pleasure is passed along to those who know my work…Beauty - the beauty that is in the landscape - is a sealed book to many, hence in a degree the landscape painter may magnify his calling, for is he not one who is helping to open the eyes of the blind that they may see the hand of our Heavenly Father in the things that he has made for our delight?
However, the Pre-Raphaelites were not the only source of inspiration in the artistic development of Goodwin; more important perhaps for the development of his mature style was Joseph Mallord William Turner - and the link between Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Goodwin was, of course, Ruskin. Goodwin met Ruskin towards the end of the 1860, probably as a result of his association with Hughes and Brown, and during the next few years, a friendship developed between them, with Goodwin holidaying with Ruskin at Abingdon and Matlock in 1871, and then in the following year, Goodwin spent three months touring Italy with Ruskin and another one of his protégés, Arthur Severn. The relationship with Ruskin was of considerable importance to Goodwin, as until then he had paid little attention to drawing, but had been noted as an artist with 'an originality and courage in…the use of his paint box'. Now, under the guidance of Ruskin, he began to pay more attention to drawing, noting some years later that,
I owe much thanks to Ruskin, who ballyragged me into love of form when I was getting too content with color alone: and color alone is luxury…how much I enjoyed the three months I had when I took up with drawing when with Ruskin in Italy; and how good it was for one. The pleasure that is to be found in lines which should string a drawing together is almost an unknown quantity in these days of paint and paint only.
Although it was Ruskin who made Goodwin show a greater concern for drawing, and who encouraged him in the development of his sensitive use of the pen, it was the example of Turner who above all liberated the genius of Albert Goodwin. Ruskin himself had no difficulty in reconciling his admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites with his passion for Turner, as he saw them representing two stages of artistic development; for having exhorted the young artist to study nature most carefully, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing', he goes on to say, 'then, when their memories are stored, and their imagination fed…let them take up the scarlet and gold, give reins to their fancy and show us what their heads are made of'. It is into this second stage that Turner's work falls, and Goodwin himself from the mid 1870's, but most especially from around the turn of the century, more and more in his poetic use of color and sensitive use of the pen, succumbed to the magical spell of Turner's work; so much so, that he subsequently observed that 'I wonder sometimes of the spirit of old Turner makes use of my personality! I often find myself doing the very things that he seemed to do'. Turner was important for Goodwin in two particular aspects of his work; in the first place, he was greatly influenced by Turner's skill in combining fact and fancy in his landscapes views, thus emulating that feature of Turner's work so aptly described by Ruskin as 'imaginative topography' and secondly, he learned certain technical skills, such as the ability of achieving both breadth and detail in his water-colors, by a skilful and sensitive combination of wash and pen-work - characteristics that are well illustrated in much of his later work, especially from the years circa 1895-1925.
Although Goodwin is now best remembered for his work in watercolors, he also worked from time to time in oils. His large oil painting of Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves was bought by the Tate Gallery under the terms of the Chantery Bequest of 300 guineas in 1901. Indeed, in the early part of his career, he seriously considered the possibility of working more extensively in oils. It may be that he was caught up in the prevailing belief that oil painting was a higher and more serious art form, and the one by which artistic reputations were made. Fortunately he sought the advice of Ruskin, who rightly observed that I have always felt deep regret at your taking to oil… The virtue of oil, as I understand it, is perfect delineation of solid form in deep local color.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights is a loose collection of stories written in Arabic, which were known in Europe by the early-eighteenth century. Their magic and adventure captivated the Western imagination and greatly contributed to the vogue for 'oriental' literature and images into the nineteenth century.
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is generally regarded as one of these tales. Here, in an enchanted landscape, Goodwin shows the moment when Ali Baba observes the thieves entering a cave, which they have opened by pronouncing the words 'Open, Sesame!'.

Like Blake before him, Ruskin too sensed the limitations of the earthbound oil technique for the creation of poetic and imaginative landscape painting - an opinion shared by another critic who attacked some of Goodwin's exhibited oils as 'lacking the delicacy of his watercolor work'. Moreover, Goodwin himself, although he continued to dabble in oils for the rest of his life, generally found the oil medium too intractable and unsuited to his artistic temperament, 'Washed, and put away brushes and oil paint, for a finish up of a week of - what is to me - a horrid material, after the purity of clean-smelling water-colour…'. In spite of his earlier Pre-Raphaelite training of working directly from nature, Goodwin, as his career progressed, worked more and more from memory. His normal procedure was to do sketches directly from nature and then work these sketches up in the studio, although it should be borne in mind that quite often the sketches were made some years before, as Goodwin noted in the catalogue of an exhibition he held at the Fine Art Society in 1896, when he wrote that 'though I date my pictures at the time of their completion. I would by no means have it inferred that the whole of the exhibition has been done within the last year. Some of the subjects were begun as many as twenty years ago'. Thus, although his work was firmly rooted in his own direct experiences, he increasingly recreated these experiences through the veil of his memory, as this allowed his imagination to raise a subject from being a 'mere portrait tied down to hard facts', into a poetic interpretation of his experience. The importance of the role played by his memory and imagination, is seen more clearly when one notes from the titles of his numerous exhibited works, that Goodwin was an inveterate traveler, visiting not only all parts of Britain, but also Jersey, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Crete, Belgium, India, North America, the West Indies, New Zealand and Sicily. It could be argued that many of his best pictures were inspired by India and the 'gorgeous east', by Switzerland and the Alps - the experience of which prompted him, in his old age, to ask, 'Will there be anything more wonderful than the higher Alps in the Kingdom of Heaven?'. And finally, of course, 'my own native land England always seems more than ever an epitome of all countries - the best of them "done in little. Although the bulk of Goodwin's work could be correctly described as poeticized topography, he also had a penchant for imaginative works inspired by readings of the Arabian Nights - EBook-The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night - (his grand-daughter recalls that Sinbad was one of his favorite stories), the Bible, Dante etc. In addition to Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, another source of inspiration for Goodwin's art was Oriental Art, with which he well have come into contact as early as 1876 on his first visit to Egypt - although Oriental art was then becoming quite fashionable in European art circles. Certainly many of his compositions, framed as they often are by branches of trees or sprays of blossom, and sometimes with an emphasis on an asymmetrical design, suggest a knowledge of Oriental art. In fact, it is interesting to note in 1890 he shared an exhibition at the Fine Art Society with a show of Japanese art, and in the catalogue he observed that: Painted as some of them have been with the knowledge that Japanese art would be in the next room, there may have crept in unawares the hope that in landscape are the West should not play second fiddle to the East, though between Japanese and British painting there can be no question of rivalry, the points of view of each being so utterly dissimilar. It seems quite questionable that the West takes knowledge, and is able to assimilate with advantage some of the color and decorative design of the Eastern schools, but is a one sided business. The advantages are to us, and not to them, who seem to make shipwreck of their powers when they endeavor to engraft anything of ours into their own art… I am conscious of my own indebtedness both to Japanese and Moorish art… Goodwin's delicate color schemes, his finely felt sense of atmosphere, and his poetic treatment of landscape, have rightly made him one of the most distinctive and unique artists of his time; indeed, Goodwin's artistic vision is so highly personalized, that it would be difficult to confuse his work with any of his contemporaries. Nor should one forget that his career spans a remarkably long period, for although we tend to think of him as a Victorian, he was active as an artist until as late as 1932. Nevertheless, Goodwin's art was totally unaffected by the radical changes that took place in the art world in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, all left his own artistic vision quite intact. Of his contemporaries his own particular favorites were 'Arthur Rackham…Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway… and in his home,' recalls his grand-daughter, 'there were absolutely no "old masters"… and we were brought up knowing nothing at all about other great and famous artists. I think Turner was the only one I ever heard of till I went to school.' Although Goodwin stood aside from the mainstream of the twentieth century art, it is, somewhat ironically, precisely in the period after 1900 that much of his best work was produced, for it is encouraging to note that there is little evidence of any reduction in his artistic ability with advancing years. Indeed, much of his later work takes on an increasingly ethereal quality as his mastery of pen and wash, and of breadth and detail, so frequently achieve a quite magical unison. His passion for painting was uncontrollable right to the end, and his grand-daughter recalls how in the 1920's, when he moved, with his daughters, into a new house with plain plastered walls, he was made to promise to paint the walls - but one day the aunts went out on a shopping spree, and when they came back Grandpa had been unable to resist painting the walls of his little bedroom floor to ceiling in wavy red and yellow and black stripes with conventional sunflowers at the top of them. It was really very nice. He just couldn't help painting. He would get at lovely old bits of black oak furniture when people were out and paint them all over. Our house was full of furniture painted by Grandpa. Also he used to haunt the town rubbish tip, and collect bits of broken china which he made into the most lovely mosaics set in cement in iron blacksmith-made trays. These were set in the outside walls of the house and made into frames for mirrors and mantle-pieces etc. He used to employ a carpenter who made boxes and shelves etc. of plain deal which Grandpa then painted. I still have a 'play-box' with a wild cat in a lovely jungle painted by him…he seemed never to stop painting except to eat or bicycle or walk…
This essay is reprinted with editions from the article in the Old Water-Color Society's Club, Volume 54, 1979
Articles on Albert Goodwin Compiled by Chris Beetles for the Art Renewal Center:

Why Albert Goodwin Matters
By Godfrey Barker
Goodwin, born in 1845, arrived on the Victorian landscape scene when the shadow of J M W Turner began to fall long upon it. The elevation of Turner as the sun-god of Victorian art was the passionate mission of Ruskin and Ruskin's elevation of Turner, alongside his elevation of the Pre-Raphaelites, created difficulties for every artist after 1870 who wished to paint in subtler tones than the brilliance of William Holman Hunt and the dazzling yellows preferred by Turner. The towering status of Turner as genius of the century raised problems not only for Goodwin but for other watercolorists, for such independent spirits as Allingham, Birket Foster, Brabazon, Inchbold, Palmer, Richardson, even Whistler. How to be individual in the glare of such a man? How to build on Turner's achievement, yet escape from him?
There was a second prison from which Goodwin felt the need to escape - an artistic cell to which he was confined by John Ruskin.
Ruskin, with his conviction that form mattered more than color, commanded Goodwin in his youth that the artist must always choose for his subject a scene or an object of beauty - that is, a subject beautiful in its own right. In Victorian England, where the landscape changed dramatically every day under the weight of heavy industry and the blue sky turned to smoky grey, this requirement ruled out an enormous number of subjects. The Ruskin rule in effect condemned the artist to paint something other than what lay before him - to escape from ugly modern life to scenes more beautiful, to escape, in old-fashioned language, to the ideal world that was inhabited by painters from Raphael to Sir Joshua Reynolds. In a phrase, Ruskin forbade the existence of 'Contemporary Art' - or much, if not all of it.
Goodwin's diaries make clear that he chafed at this. He envied James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who expressed public contempt for Ruskin, and he envied the freedom Whistler felt to paint the ugly and to be expressionist about it. In some diary entries, Goodwin openly admired Whistler, feeling him to be more correct about color than Ruskin was about form.
Which way to go? Forcing himself to choose, Goodwin backed the 19th century, declaring Ruskin to be 'the truer wisdom' (Diary, 29 December 1914). He decided this when Ruskin was out of date in a 20th century that has elevated the ugly. Goodwin, in his grave, may nourish the hope that in the 21st Century he, Ruskin and the concept of beauty will steam back into fashion - that ugliness has run its course with the ultra-democratic art history of our time.
The escape of Albert Goodwin from Turner and Ruskin, the lifetime journey that he made to a style maturely and unmistakably his own, was not an easy one.
I sometimes wonder if the spirit of old Turner takes over my personality. I often find (or think I find) myself doing the very same things that he seemed to do.
That is no more than a reference to Goodwin using spare paint on the palette at the end of one picture to start a new one but it announces the eternal presence of Turner in his mind. Hammond Smith, Goodwin's first and chief biographer, claims that his admiration for Turner was more present in his post-1900 work than at any other time,
in his poetic and atmospheric use of color, in his delicate and much more sensitive use of the pen, but most especially perhaps in his ability to combine a feeling for breadth with an eye for detail, which was such an unique feature of Turner's work.
One sees why he says this: "lay Turner's Fort Vimieux of 1831 alongside a 1914 Goodwin sunset and it does look as if little has happened in between. Turner's rendering of vast, glowing abstract areas of color in the 1835-40 oils and watercolors is undoubtedly faithfully reproduced in many Goodwin works. And yet Goodwin can be easily distinguished from Turner. How?"

Fort Vimieux: 1831
by Joseph Mallord William Turner

I tried to find the 1914 Sunset but I couldn't find it. At least there was no certainty in my untrained mind that is was the painting mentioned in this article. Yet, I did find a couple which, I think, bears out the point of Goodwin's use of color in his watercolors. Compare the next two works with Turner's Fort Vimieux.

Senex Magister

A Tropical Sunset

Venice

The answer seems to be that Turner is the truer Impressionist of the two - more concerned to lay down the truth of 'atmosphere' than to provide information of what is seen. The late Victorian Goodwin differed from Turner by his increasing interest in the subject, by thrusting topography into the viewer's face - even in openly atmospheric attempts like The Lights of Lauterbrunnen in 1919, which owes much to the late Turner Swiss views but tells us far more. Goodwin does this even in unashamed imaginations like the mood music Benares, a view of 1917 which the artist never saw in the moonlight in which he painted it and which is for many his masterpiece.

Benares: 1917

Goodwin's struggle, documented in the diaries, to be his own man and not the prisoner of Turner had one unusual consequence. It is that a majority of his most assured and individual work dates from his last twenty years.
To be at your best, imaginatively and technically, near your end is an unusual feat for any artist. Yet Goodwin's diaries reveal that he was thinking more intensely about painting in his 70's and 80's than at any other point of his life - and his work visibly flourished under his thought. What was swirling in his head in the 1910's and 1920's was not, however, a debate about the modern movement. It is a debate between Victorian dilemmas.
Goodwin has nothing to say about Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Cubism and the new directions of art, though in August 1909 he tells his diary that much Impressionism is 'laziness' and 'scamping on detail'. Paris, though not too far from Bexhill, was a world away in mind. So too is Ascot, Berkeley Square and the Roaring Twenties. Goodwin was to his end a Victorian and if he did his best work after 1900 Victorian England was still a powerful and enduring influence and Turner still a god.
To those who believe that art before 1925 is the rise of the School of Paris and the irrelevance or decease of all 19th century talent, including Goodwin, this judgment may come as a surprise.
But it is true. Along with Soames Forsyte in Galsworthy's great novel, Goodwin was one of many Victorians who survived long into the 20th century. As in The Forsyte Saga, Victorian conviction did not lie down and die with the death of the Queen in 1901. It continued to exist and make strong opinions felt about the decadence of Edwardian Europe and early 20th century art. And should any reader assume that Turner was somehow passé with the public in the age when Kandinsky and Picasso began work, the reverse is true: Turner was high fashion, and so was Albert Goodwin. On the art market, from the £ 5,250 cost of Turner's Walton Bridges in 1872, there is a rise of 1500 per cent in forty years - in a gold standard age of roughly constant money - to the £ 30,800 paid by Henry Clay Frick for Mortlake Terrace in 1913. Turner was second only to Raphael and Gainsborough in world art prices when Goodwin filled his diary with esteem before the First World War. The Turner followers rose equally fast in value over the same period.

The Thames near Walton Bridges
by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Mortlake Terrace: 1826
by Joseph Mallord William Turner

This has some bearing on the issue of Goodwin and the modern movement. Art historians - not least Frances Spalding in her Dictionary of 20th Century Painters and Sculptors - tend to write Goodwin (and many other Victorians who survived after 1900) out of the record. The judgment, a teleological one, is that the painters who mattered in the early 20th Century are those whom art historians prize in 2007. There is an alternative view as to who matters: the judgment of the age in which the artist lived. Albert Goodwin, as much as J M W Turner, was high fashion.
Art historians are writers who point telescopes at the past to advance the genius that they believe in. Their judgment makes some artists forward-looking and fashionable and others passé. Life is not like that. In his time, Goodwin was the future and the fashion. So was Turner. Picasso and the modern movement were not. Art history is just one type of selection of who matters and what matters, as vulnerable itself to dismissal in the name of fashion as the artists it rejects. That Goodwin painted alongside Picasso and Matisse, that he lived into the age of T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land - oddly, he and Eliot might have conversed well - is just one of those complexities that the impossible 20th Century has to take into account.

T. S. Eliot in 1938
by Wyndham Lewis

Fashion and art history are transient things. What endures is art creation and merit.
It matters not that in the definition of Frances Spalding and certain art historians, Goodwin was not 'of his time' or century after 1905, to use that imprisoning phrase of Baudelaire which has so limited the judgments of art history. And it is simply wrong to dismiss him - or any other artist - as part of a Victorian past that, at a thunderclap, became dead on the spot in 1901 and was without further relevance.
Life is not so tidy and this is simply bad history. Goodwin did important work on either side of the First World War, and during it. His most personal pictures of this time have a value which is considerably understated in 2007. That understatement also means that his 21st century price is absurdly low.
So how are we to praise Albert Goodwin? The Maidstone prodigy did not go short in his own time. His first painting to be acclaimed reached the Royal Academy by age 15, as did Turner's. Ruskin, who gave Goodwin a first Grand Tour of Europe, complete with culture shocks, in 1872, made him a favorite son and saluted his 'pure aesthetic delight'.

Westminster

Beachy Head: 1920

The Gardens, Pallanza

Goodwin possessed an extraordinary gift for modeling landscape with the sponge in single colors and lower and lower tones, using the pen to delineate form during and at the end of the process, never at the start. After Turner, no other watercolorist laid down giant zones of abstract color with such sureness. It looks to be effortless; but when Lord Clark - Sir Kenneth Clark - went sketching with Goodwin in 1913 and 1914 and sought to imitate his methods, which Clark usefully describes, he achieved only 'mechanical' results. Stare too, here at Goodwin's use of grey - in Lincoln Canal (1926) or the two views of Palma, Majorca (1925, # 125 and 127) - the color most important in his palette by 1910, into which he deliberately retreated and which he used to highlight the adjacent tones. Goodwin disliked 'the comparative deadness of Nature' in the Victorian palette but achieved his high color by contrasts, placing grey alongside bright tints rather than resorting to the shrieking colors of Expressionism. Grey is a quiet color, but it realized his aim. 'Actual reticence (is) far more subtle and beautiful', Goodwin confides to his diary in 1909, than 'Pre-Raphaelite superlatives'.

Lincoln Canal: 1926

Palma, Majorca: 1925 # 125

Palma, Majorca: 1925 # 127

Then, for surprise, note the startling visual angles from which Goodwin often works.
This is not a man content, as were the mass of Victorian topographers, with the banality of the level horizon, with inchoate groping at the picturesque and sublime by snapshots up to misty mountain-tops. Beachy Head is painted from a steep and plunging Japanese point of vision. Often, too, his compositions shift the main focus of the painting one plane to the side, so that the Harbor at Bristol is an afterthought to much detail of telegraph poles, barrows, barge boys and shipping masts. Goodwin, among artists, was uniquely fond of scaffolding which he uses to conceal the main interest in Lincoln Canal and in five dozen other views - even his paintings of cathedrals.

Bristol: 1893

This is not the Harbor at Bristol but an earlier work of Goodwin.

Senex Magister

Is Goodwin an Impressionist? He gets no mention in Laura Wortley's rewarding 1988 book on British Impressionism but then we must get down to basic definitions, French and English.
When Wynford Dewhurst asserted in 1904 that Impressionism was rooted in the English Landscape Tradition, he drew an angry response from Pissarro. Pissarro came to London with Monet in 1870 and spent much time in the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum with Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. 'This Mr. Dewhurst understands nothing', Pissarro responded. What he and Monet found in the landscapes of Gainsborough was plein-air light and fugitive effects, what they found in Turner were errors and imperfections: 'his analysis of shadow… is … a mere absence of light', his tone division was present but incorrect. For the true Impressionist, runs the message, the treatment of shadow is the thing that matters: shadow is light of a different quality and color. It is not laid down with blacks and browns and earth tints, it is not the product of neutral shades and half-tones but it displays and is built up with the pure colors of the spectrum. Shadow is the great advance buried in Impressionism - the advance, if you like, between Manet's Music in the Tuileries in 1862 and Monet's Impression: Sunrise in 1872.

Music in the Tuileries: 1862
by Édouard Manet

Impression, Sunrise: 1872
by Claude Monet

A true Impressionist painting, Pissarro might also have added, is an expression of mood rather than a document of a time or a place.
This definition I append to exclude much American plein-air painting, 1890-1920, from Impressionism. But the very thought floats upon a sea of confusion, for English art critics were once disposed to hail any landscape of mood or 'atmosphere' as 'Impressionist'.
Where do all these definitions leave Goodwin? His shadows seem to gain light and color as early as 1884. But working in watercolor, he does not divide tone. Many of his pictures are documents but, like Turner's, many are not. The truth is that Goodwin painted numerous Impressionist pictures but he also painted many that are not. Most of his 'Impressionism' was done far from Britain in countries where the light invites, but he was 'Impressionist' also at home painting sunsets on the seashore; his chief interest was the mood of clouds and the sinking sun (much analyzed in the diaries, especially in the wartime years). Goodwin painted much, right up to the end of his life, which in no way meets Pissarro's definition. But he would gratify the definitions of Philip Wilson Steer, who declared in 1891 to the Art Workers' Guild that Impressionism had existed since the frieze of the Parthenon and represented any poetic rather than factual treatment of a scene.
Albert Goodwin defies any easy analysis. His life was a struggle to escape artistic pigeon-holes. He followed the precepts of Turner and Ruskin but admired Whistler. He is sometimes an Impressionist, sometimes not. He was trained by Pre-Raphaelites, stayed loyal to the 'truth' they asserted, but ultimately deserted them. What is constant is the pleasure and deep reward he gave to his contemporaries and which he continues to give now.
Articles on Albert Goodwin Compiled by Chris Beetles for the Art Renewal Center:

Various Works of Albert Goodwin

A Baptism of Flowers: 1877

A Days End

A Nile Sunset: 1916

A Street in Naples: 1926

A View of Cairo at Sunset

Alpine Valley

Aspen Trees in Autumn: 1865

This early watercolor by Goodwin was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1866. Its subject tallies with the exhibition title, and reviewers' descriptions confirm the identification. The Athenaeum mentioned the `still pool with trees' and the Illustrated London News noted the sunset effect leading to extreme `oppositions of color'.
The exhibition opened in February, three months before the main London exhibition season, and was Goodwin's first opportunity to exhibit a work produced the previous autumn.
The painting was extensively and generally well reviewed. The Illustrated London News stated: Mr. Goodwin is an artist of whom much may be expected. Highest praise came from the critic of the Saturday Review:
"Aspen Trees in Autumn. Albert Goodwin. - This is one of the most remarkable works in the room. It is a thoroughly careful study of autumnal color, great attention being evident at the same time paid to form, and to light and shade. So earnest an endeavor to unite the three great qualities of good painting is seldom met with. And the best of it is that on all three points the artist has succeeded. The trees are most gracefully drawn, the color is very true, and the arrangement of light and shade so telling that the work would engrave well."
At the beginning of his career, Goodwin had worked as an oil painter but in the 1860's he transferred his allegiance to watercolors. This change of medium would have been encouraged by such praise.
The Dudley Gallery was a natural choice of venue for Goodwin at this period of transition. The exhibition of the Old and New Watercolor Societies were restricted to the works of members and associates, and in the mid Nineteenth Century, artists who worked in oil as well as watercolor were rarely elected. The Royal Academy displayed watercolor work poorly.
The Dudley Gallery was founded in 1865 as an alternative open exhibition for watercolors. It attracted aspirants to the two older societies (in fact Goodwin was elected Associate of the Old Watercolor Society in 1872), as well as watercolors by established oil painters. Because it was run by a committee of young artists, it gained a reputation for liberalism and in the 1860's was favored by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. Goodwin was a pupil of both Hughes and Madox Brown, and it is worth noting that the Dudley Gallery was the only London exhibition used by Madox Brown in this period.

Apocalypse

Basle

Blankeney, Norfolk: 1919

Boulay Bay, Jersey: 1864

In the summer of 1864, Ford Madox Brown wrote a letter to his patron James Leathart of Newcastle suggesting that he purchased a series of beautiful works of Jersey by his pupil, Albert Goodwin. He predicted that the young painter would become the greatest landscape artist of his time:
"My pupil Mr. Goodwin has recently returned from Jersey with a very admirable set of drawings - As I promised him to send them to you for inspection and also you may remember promised you to do so, I take it upon me without further leave to have them placed in the case along with 'Oure Ladye' for although, as you say, you are not at present prepared for extensive purchase, yet these drawings, all who have seen them think so very beautiful that I cannot help thinking you will retain some of them.
Considering how fine most of them are and the extreme youth of the artist (only 19) I think there can be no doubt of his becoming before long one of the greatest landscape painters of the age.
Hughes who was his first master came over this afternoon to help us to price them, we have done to the best of our ability and the result is the enclosed list.
Should you buy any or even all (for it is a very cheap list) we should feel obliged by your sending back the whole of them in a week - for as yet scarce any one has seen them and no doubt they will do him much good by being shown …"
(Letter held in the Library of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, dated July 18th, 1864)
During his years studying with Madox Brown, Goodwin described how he had learned the need of hard work. Boulay Bay is undoubtedly one of those works referred to in Madox Brown's letter quoted above, painted with a rich primary color scheme reminiscent of Brown's own magical realism, seen in intense colors of his landscape masterpiece, Walton on the Naze (Birmingham City Art Gallery).

Walton on the Naze
by Ford Madox Brown

The artist (Ford Madox Brown) and his family stayed in Walton-on-the-Naze, a small town on the Essex coast, in August 1859. The gentleman on the left discussing the beauty of the scene is undoubtedly a self-portrait of Brown. The lady and the little girl, drying their hair after bathing, are his wife Emma and their daughter Catherine. The scene is concerned with the theme of leisure, and the developing mid-nineteenth century interest in tourism. Londoners could reach the resort by steamer - visible on the horizon. The tourists are contrasted against the world of work represented by the stacks of wheat in the foreground, the smoking factory in the background and the ships in the estuary.

Cairo: 1905

Canterbury by Night

Certosa: 1873

Christian and Faithfull in the Grounds of Giant Despair

Cleaning Nets: 1883

Clovelly: 1921

Clovelly is a fishing village on the north coast of Devon, England. Famous for its steep cobbled high street, the village has inspired many artists with its quaint beauty.

Dartmoor, Gorge of the Teign: 1913

Dover, The Harbour Works: 1906-07

Durham: 1900

Durham Cathedral

This hazy view of Durham Cathedral shows Albert Goodwin's interest in atmosphere and light. The trees and water emerge from a mist of color in a manner similar to the style of J.M.W. Turner, whose work Goodwin admired. Albert Goodwin was based in London, but travelled extensively to paint landscapes.

Exeter: 1922

Goring on Thames

Hastings

Holyroad

In The Smoke of His Burning: 1913

Lincoln: 1904

Low Tide on the South Coast, near Brighton: 1868

Albert Goodwin was a master of watercolor technique. This shore scene evokes the luminous glow of dusk by using a combination of washing, scumbling and sponging with rich effervescent coolers. Albert Goodwin was living in Waterloo Street in Brighton at the time. He exhibited a series of these radiantly atmospheric twilit scenes at the Dudley Gallery from 1866 onwards where they were noted for their magnificent color, one being described as … all aflame with its crimson sunset (The Spectator, 1866).

Under the influence of his mentors, Arthur Hughes, Ford Madox Brown and, to an extent, Samuel Palmer, Albert Goodwin's landscape watercolors became more poetical toward the end of the 1860's. Nature was to Goodwin a manifestation of God Himself, and painting an outlet for his growing religious spirituality: The whole natural world, down to the smallest detail, is one great allegory, typical of the spiritual world. Our business is to study the natural world as the continued revelation of God, guiding us forever into fresh revelation of Himself. (An extract from Albert Goodwin's Diary)

Lucerne

Matlock

Mont San Michel: 1898

Moored Boats in Rotterdam

Monte Carlo at Night: 1926

Mountain Mist: 1870

On the Road to Winchester

Penzance

Saint Leonard's: 1908

Saint Leonard's demonstrates the level of technical and visual sophistication that Albert Goodwin achieved. His objective in the watercolor is to give a sense of aerial perspective; both his purpose and his solution owe much to his study of Turner. No compositional support is required to allow the viewer to feel the expanse of wet sand that forms the vast triangular foreground to the drawing. The modulation of color within this area, combined with a density of glistening texture, allows the eye to perceive the area as a flat expanse on the basis of abstract visual information.

Saint Michael's Mount: 1913

Salisbury Close: 1897

Shipwreck: Sinbad the Sailor Storing his Raft - 1887

Shore Scene at Sunset: 1865

Sleeping in the Moonlight, Monastery of Saint Francis of Assisi

Sunset, The Lion's Mouth Surinam Dutch Guiana: 1912

Sunset Through Woodland: 1865

The Abby Church, Christchurch

The Evening Service Salisbury

The Hardy Norseman in Venice: 1904

The Jungle

The Phantom Ship: 1900

The Rain from Heaven, All Souls, Oxford: 1922

The Sea Raiders

The Shipbreakers Yard

The Source of the Sacred River: ca 1900

The Venetian Lagoons

The Village of Corfe

Torre del Greco and Capri

Verona

Venice: 1892

Albert Goodwin first travelled to Venice in 1872 in the company of John Ruskin, the greatest enthusiast for the city of the Victorian age. Although Goodwin made subsequent visits there, he developed his sketches and ideas from this early trip until the end of the century, stating in the catalogue of his 1896 London exhibition:
"Though I date my pictures at the time of their completion, I would by no means have it inferred that the whole of this exhibition has been done in the last year. Some of the subjects were begun as many as twenty years ago."
It is clear, however, that the present work has its genesis in a later visit. Albert Goodwin shed the Pre-Raphaelite inspiration, and under Turner's influence developed a brilliant rendering of space and atmosphere, seen to full effect in his handling of the pastel.
His qualities were still recognized in 1933 in his obituaries, for Albert Goodwin was one of the few Victorian painters to retain his popularity in the twentieth century. The Connoisseur wrote:
"Mr. Albert Goodwin... was one of the few artists for whom some measure of Old Mastership can be reasonably predicted in their lifetimes. A landscape painter of rare delicacy and imagination, he possessed the art of capturing effects so ethereal as to make them almost impossible of attainment by ordinary means. There are not many artists who have this facility, but Goodwin was one of them."

Venice-Midsummer Dawn: ca 1872 - ca 1900

Albert Goodwin took a three-month trip to Italy in 1872 with John Ruskin who was his mentor and perhaps the greatest Victorian enthusiast for the city of Venice. It is clear, however, that Venice - A Midsummer Dawn has its foundation in a later visit to Venice. Goodwin has shed the Ruskin qualities visible in so many of his works and under Turner's influence developed a brilliant rendering of space and atmosphere. He had the ability to convey a sense of atmosphere with areas of nebulous washes flecked with calligraphic touches.

View from the Entrance to Meadow Building
Christchurch College, Oxford: 1923

Wells from Roof of Parish Church: 1903

Westminster: 1917

Winchester: 1864

This watercolor dates from the period when Goodwin was studying under Madox Brown, and shares many characteristics of Brown's Pre-Raphaelite landscapes of the 1850's, although already Goodwin's distinctive concern with atmospheric effects is apparent in the subtle treatment of the sunset sky and its reflection. From Brown, Goodwin said he learnt the need of hard work. In this particular watercolor he also seems to have learnt from Brown's ability to juxtapose red roofs and green foliage, from his ability to produce a loving depiction of an ordinary scene (for this view is not a conventionally picturesque composition) and from his interest in the inhabitants of a place as they go about their daily lives. Even in this tiny watercolor Goodwin has introduced a group of men fishing and a woman and child with a dog.
Brown was clearly impressed by the picture. An old label on the backboard records that Boyce bought it off the artist through the intermediary of Ford Madox Brown. Boyce is another painter whom the work would have interested, as he produced detailed watercolors of vernacular buildings and old towns similar to this.

Whitby

Whitby Abbey: 1910

Whitby Abbey was founded by Saint Hilda in 657 and was destroyed by the Danes in 867. The building in Goodwin's painting was constructed in the thirteenth century. In 1830 one of the Abbey's towers collapsed. The Abbey today looks just as it does in this painting.
Goodwin loved painting dramatic, poetic landscapes. The richly glowing deep blue of the sky in this painting is very typical of his work. Whitby Abbey was a favorite subject for Goodwin, partly because of its ruinous appearance, but also because he was deeply religious man, with a profound interest in spiritual subjects. When Goodwin painted this in 1910, he had been painting Whitby Abbey intermittently for at least fourteen years. Goodwin spent much of his life travelling, visiting Egypt, India and America, as well as travelling extensively in Britain and Europe. He painted many of the places he visited.

Whitby Abbey: 1922

Whitby by Moonlight: 1907

Source: Albert Goodwin Online
Source: Art Renewal Center

This page is the work of Senex Magister
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