Blog

26 June 2024

                                Compton, North Cambrian Mountains (1820 edn),  ‘Rhaiadyr Y Wennol, Caernarvonshire’

Emmanuel’s collection of nineteenth-century illustrated books – containing numerous Romantic depictions of what was perceived as picturesque landscape from around the world – includes so many representations of waterfalls as to prompt questions about what our forebears saw in these remarkable natural features. In cultures across the world, waterfalls hold cultural and spiritual significance. To take one example among many: in Shinto tradition in Japan waterfalls are held to be sacred and cleansing.

For searchers for the picturesque in Britain, waterfalls were part of those wild uplands that excited their admiration for rugged scenery and sublime perspectives of great height and distance.  Waterfalls gave rise to feelings of awe and apprehension of something greater than ourselves. Accounts of travels to wild Wales featured many depictions of famous waterfalls, which had often long been held to be sites of mystery and magic in local folklore.  Thomas Compton’s The North Cambrian Mountains (1817, 1820) includes some striking depictions that attempt to convey the sheer volume and force of waterfalls plunging through landscapes.

                                  Compton, North Cambrian Mountains (1817 edn), ‘Pistyll Rhaiadyr’, Montgomeryshire’

                                                                              ‘Rhaiadyr Du, Merionethshire’

Alongside such Romantic images, it is interesting to compare Classical Chinese painting, where waterfalls are a symbol of impermanence: the waterfall continues yet is never the same, implicitly contrasted with the changelessness of the rocks that surround and interrupt the water’s fall.

                                                                             ‘Pystyll Y Cain, Merionethshire’

                                                                         ‘Rhaiadyr Y Mawddach, Merionethshire’

In this way, the waterfall represents a persistence of form, notwithstanding a constant change of content. The cool and misty colours in Brian Broughton’s Six Picturesque Views in North Wales (1801) well convey this defining presence and energy in the waterfalls and cascades that he depicts.

                                                                      Broughton, Six Picturesque Views (1801)

                                                            T. H. Fielding, The English Lakes (1821), ‘Skelwith Force’

The many published accounts of tours to the Lake District that poured forth in this period also included frequent illustrations of waterfalls, as in T. H. Fielding’s

A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes (1821), of which Emmanuel holds three different editions. The essence of such images is the impression of an unstoppable torrent, dashing against rocks, defining its location yet always in flux.

To depict water falling dramatically from a great height is a recurrent challenge to artists, particularly well met in the dramatic uncoloured lithographs in Harry Longueville Jones’s Scenery of the Snowdonian Mountains (1829), where each lithograph bears the imprint of C Hullmandel, the inventor of lithography.

                                                                             English Lakes, ‘Lowdore Fall’

                                                                            Jones, Snowdonian Mountains

A fascination with depicting waterfalls in Britain is carried with them by artists recording the picturesque in landscapes much further afield, as in James Hakewill’s now-rare A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (1825).

                                                                             English Lakes, ‘Stockgill Force’

                                 Hakewill, Jamaica (1825), ‘Cascade on the Windward Road’ (seven miles from Kingston)

It is striking that a late example of a hand-coloured book, William Cullen Byant’s Picturesque America, or The Land We Live In (New York, 1874) features a waterfall as the design of its frontispiece (the small figure of the artist is seated on the right side, depicting the cataract ‘en plein air’).

                                                Bryant, Picturesque America (1877), title page, ‘Cascade in Virginia’

                                                           Picturesque America, ‘The Upper Yellowstone Falls’

Bryant’s book includes many accounts of waterfalls, which are mentioned on the title page among the defining features of ‘Picturesque America’.

The staggering immensity of falling waters in the hand-coloured images of Thomas Baines’s The Victoria Falls (1865) are a match for the awesome proportions of the Niagara Falls in the opening image that precedes all others in Bryant’s Picturesque America.

                                                                                     Baines, Victoria Falls

                                                                     Picturesque America, frontispiece, ‘Niagara’

Artists of images fixed on the page must convey the constant motion of unstoppable forces. They must assume that vision will summon up sound: that viewers will also hear in their inward ear the characteristic music of waterfalls, from tinkle and splash to awe-inspiring roar.

Barry Windeatt, Keeper of Rare Books

• Back to All Blog Posts