Rebellious Landscapes – William James Linton´s art of graphic Macchia.

Lintoniana VI

What had laid the foundations for Linton’s reputation as a leading proponent of artistic xylography in the 19th century was the extraordinary intensity of his landscape depictions and the graphic freedom that he allowed himself to this end. The apex of his decade-long landscape work was marked in the mid 1860s by the publication of his two comprehensive Lake Country cycles. As the American engraver John P. Davis recalled in Century Magazine in 1889, they made him “the center and soul of whatever was progressive in wood-engraving then.”1 From the first independent works towards the end of the 1830s to the illustrations of his late poetry volumes of the 1880s, the landscape image accompanied him as a projection screen for his radical-democratic utopias and the experiences he had made in realpolitik.

 

Utopian Nature

In their pictorial expressivity, the series of stirring scenarios that he created in 1839 for the title pages of his radical-democratic journal, The National. A Library for the People, reveal him as a contemporary of Theodore Rousseau, the founder of the French Barbizon school, and his dramatised landscape ideal. Several of the localities that Linton presented, for example, Tintern Abbey, the Castle of Chillon or the Chapel of Wilhelm Tell, were combined – corresponding with the didactic claim of his periodical – with poems of revolutionary Romanticism. The sense of directness that the engravings conveyed, however, was not caused by a direct impression of nature but reproduction-graphically by the impulsive style of the hatchings and the expressive chiaroscuro, into which Linton had translated the graphic model. This mode of a pressing temporality, unparalleled in the landscape graphics of his times, was in line with the script on which the series was based.

Linton: The National. A Library for the People.London 1839

Bryant / Linton: The Flood of Years. New York 1877p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }

Viewed individually, one could regard the depictions of destructive forces of nature and ancient ruins, such as the Sun Temple of Baalek, the Colosseum in Rome or Puerto Rico devastated by an earthquake, as manifestations of Edmund Burke’s picturesque definition of the horrific and sublime. Only viewed in sequence does it become evident that they follow the models of Comte de Volney’s anti-imperialistic treatise, The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), from which Linton repeatedly cited in the periodical.2 In De Volney, the unleashed forces of nature and imperial relicts presented the regulating forces of a nature that in an entropic way strived for a state of highest equality as the ultimate aim of creation. The eschatological grounding of Linton’s image sequence is superimposed by a second line of argumentation that uses the rousing dynamism of the cataracts, storms, waterfalls, and earthquakes overwhelming the viewer as a symbol of the revolutionary power of accumulation. In his poem, The Gathering of the People, also written in 1839, Linton gave this vision of the propellant power of creating swarms a highly suggestive expression in language. Under the title Storm Song, it became a central hymn of the early English workers’ movement during the uprisings of 1848, where it was sung by a choir and musical accompaniment at Chartist assemblies to the music of Beethoven.3 In a much more concrete and precise manner than many other republican-minded artists of the day, Linton interpreted the image of boundless nature as a reflection of revolutionary forces in that he additionally understood it, beyond the aspect of energetics, in process-related terms as an historical image. Forty years later, in his illustrations for William Cullen Bryant’s poems, Thanatopsis and The Flood of Years, he returned to this complex and dynamic concept of his early years.

The synthetic and dramatising style of depicting nature on the title pages of The National was enriched three years later by concrete views, gained on a tour of north-western Wales that Linton went on with his artist friend Thomas Sibson. The two experienced the hike from Birmingham’s soot-covered industrial zone to the Welsh coast as a “passage through hell”.4 A short while later, the experience of this glaring contrast between inhumane urbanity full of privation and the sensuous superabundance of a healing experience of nature found expression in the joint illustration work on Linton’s two-part poem, Bob Thin or Poorhouse Fugitive (1845). In the second part, which contains the nature-poetic sections illustrated by Linton himself, the powerful but far less expressive descriptions of mountains and forest landscapes are combined with the concrete notion of a life-reforming practice in rural communities. The dichotomy of the poem reveals the anti-civilizational, Rousseauian trait of early Radicalism that sought to counter the problems of increasing industrialisation with the agrarian concepts of a moral economy.

 

Linton: Bob Thin or Poorhouse Fugitive (1845)

Linton / Duncan: Bob Thin or Poorhouse Fugitive (1845)

Actual Nature

Yet it didn’t take long until there was a response to the idyllic image of rural communes drawn in the Poorhouse Fugitive part by two further artistic collaborators of Linton, William Bell Scott and Edward Duncan. Already a year after the publication of Bob Thin, in 1846, a series of six commented, individual pictures by Linton and Edward Duncan were published over the entire year’s issues of the popular Illustrated London News, drawing a far more realistic picture of rural life. The Agricultural Pictures cast a view with no holds barred on the trials and tribulations of agricultural existence and its late-feudal dependencies.

The – in the context of press illustrations of the time – extraordinarily naturalistic engravings showed, as the commentary emphasised, “scenes of actual life – not painter’s compositions”. Such an uncompromising manner of dealing with the dark sides of rural life and the pastoral scenery, which the Loyalist propaganda created with the aid of academic painting, could, however, look back on a longer tradition in the camp of radical journalism, among others, John Thelwall’s subtle literary observations in his surveys of rural life in The Peripathetic (1793) and William Cobbett’s popular reportages on rural life published as Rural Rides from 1822-26 in Cobbett’s in-house Political Register. Many of the paintings of George Morland, a failed genre painter held in high esteem by Linton, can also be attributed to socio-critical observations of rural conditions of this sort.5

 

Duncan / Linton:  Agricultural Pictures. Illustrated London News, London 1846

The depiction of actual rural conditions in the Agricultural Pictures can be read as a kind of supplement to the communitarian utopia of the Bob Thin poems. Both works were created against the background of demands by leading members of the London Working Men’s Association to nationalize the ownership of land. Linton was one of the main propagandists of this dispossession campaign. He also supported, albeit with many reservations, the Chartist Land Plan from 1845, which planned to distribute collectively acquired, agricultural land to the impoverished industrial proletariat. Their large-scale re-training to small-scale farmers proved to be an almost insolvable problem. The realistic descriptions of agricultural activities in Linton’s and Duncan’s series of illustrations fulfilled a double function. They were both instructions to and a critique of feudal romanticism dominant at the time. However, the image of the British cultural landscape corrupted by Loyalism was not suitable as a projection screen for Linton’s radical-democratic vision of an English republic.

In the early 1840s, Linton met the chief ideologist of the Italian unification movement, Giuseppe Mazzini, who lived in exile in London. He had responded to the repeated failure of revolutionary uprisings in his homeland with an increasing expansion of his nation-state republicanism, initially aiming for a European and then a global framework. The more Linton devoted himself to Mazzini’s cause, the further his political ambitions expanded beyond the limits of the English workers’ movement. On the other hand, he increasingly dealt with the problem of influencing, in an identity-forging manner, the foundation of a national republic, which could take on, together with the new Italy, an avant-garde role in the framework of the global process of democratization.

In literary terms, he saw himself confronted with an Herculean task. In 1852 in Newcastle, the place where Jean-Paul Marat had already written and published his initial revolutionary treatise, The Chains Of Slavery, Linton published the poetic historiography of this new English republic under the title The Plaint of Freedom. It was based on the myths of English early Protestantism and the Puritan Revolution. At the same time, from 1851 to 1856, he worked in collaboration with an international network on an opus that highlighted the contours of this grass-roots state, the authors’ journal The English Republic. What proved to be more problematic than these literary grounds was the iconographic foundation of a Young England. Reverting to iconoclastic Puritanism was hardly possible, and evocations of an imaginary Middle Ages, which both William Blake and the befriended Pre-Raffaelites were engaged in, would only play into the hands of a conservative, feudal romanticism. The embodiment of this national, republican constitution could only lie in the image of a prototypical landscape felt to be real.

 

Patriotic Nature

With the artists of the generation of ’48, the allegedly more neutral landscape image enjoyed a higher status than the historical picture, since it was suitable to not only give ideological reasons for the newly emerging national consciousness but also to physically locate it. In France it was foremost the Barbizon artists, in Germany a Carl Friedrich Lessing, in North America the Hudson River School, who created a patriotic landscape image at the intersection between heroic idealism and topographical realism distinguished by the signature of an often inaccessible wildness. Linton finally discovered his ideal topos of the new England on a journey that in 1846 led him far north to the wild and romantic Lake District. Here, a cultural climate shaped by the tradition of English Romanticism and the Lake poets, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, mingled with influences of nearby Scotland, which had spurred on the development of English radicalism since the Jacobean uprisings through rebellious personalities such as Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle. Robert Owen’s cooperative movement, which had decisively stimulated the Chartist land plan, had been founded not far away, in New Lanark in the Scottish Lowlands.

As the region with the highest mountains, as well, the Lakes were suited in an outstanding fashion, as it were, for the purpose of symbolic overglorification. At the peak of the Helvelynn, which had already been raised to the status of a national icon through the songs of Wordsworth and Walther Scott, Linton planted the blue, white and green flag that he had created for the English republic in the wake of the revolutions of ’48. Its colour sequence alluded to the symbolism of the tricolour, whose blue-white-red accord was meant to recall the motto of the revolution, liberté, égalité und fraternité, but both the horizontal arrangement and the choice of colours reveal its origin in landscape impressions. Linton used the insular triad that also dominated his landscape sketches of the Lake region. “Choose for hope the sky serene, freedom Albion’s cliffs so white, / And the eternal ocean’s green choose we for our native right: / Blue and white and green shall span England’s Flag republican.” (Our Tricolour, 1848)

Linton: The English Republic. Brantwood-London 1852

Linton: The Lake Country Sketchbook. 1863 (MePri-Collection)

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

Bryant / Linton: Thanatopsis. New York 1874

B. R.Haydon: Wordsworth on Helvellyn (1842)

In addition to a number of studies on the flora of the Lakes, two sketchbooks with landscape views have come down to us. One is in the collection of Yale University, another in the Linton-Archive of the Melton Prior Institute. They contain watercolours and drawings, which in the first sketchbook were created between May and July 1863. The studies in the second were made during hikes in the north-east of the Lakes along a route between Lake Ullswater and the Helvellyn from June 23 to July 18 of the same year.6 Both sketchbooks served to prepare a series of one hundred wood engravings which he made for a literary travel guide of his third wife, the writer Eliza Lynn.7 It was published in an extravagant edition under the title The Lake Country in 1864. Five years earlier, he had already made forty-five further engravings with Lake motifs for Harriet Martineau’s illustrated guidebook The English Lakes.

Although the motifs partially overlap, the two series differ significantly in regard to the graphic approach. While the first series of engravings focuses entirely on the graphic power of an often extremely reduced lineament – in contrast to the more painterly steel engravings and chromolithographs of the Martineau book – in the equally sketchy depictions of the subsequent work, Linton plays out the painterly qualities of the tonal engravings in an orchestration rich in variations. With its great graphic diversity and the surprising freshness of impressions of nature, the large complex of Linton’s Lake engravings mark a peak in 19th-century landscape art, which has remained unsurpassed in the area of graphic reproductions. There are several reasons for the fact that Linton saw himself challenged to his most outstanding graphic achievements precisely in the field of travel guides. On the one hand, they had to do with his feeling politically and artistically obliged to establish a republican iconography. There is hardly another publication form that would have allowed the permanently indebted xylographer to finance such a time-consuming and elaborate landscape project in the middle of the century. On the other hand, this was a supreme discipline in regard to illustration, for the genre of the Lake guidebook had already become the exemplary case of picturesque art in the 1770s through the illustrated traveller’s tales of William Gilpin and been raised to the status of high literature decades later by William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1810).8

Martineau / Linton: The English Lakes. London 1858

Martineau / Linton: The English Lakes. London 1858

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

It was the direct translation of impressions of nature that later made Linton’s Lake engravings much sought-after study objects for a young generation of Impressionist xylographers. As John P. Davis conceded, they “meant art to us, and the lines he cut were, in lieu of nature, our wonder and study.”9 Although many of the Lake engravings, especially when comparing them to the xylographic standard of the times, indeed convey the impression as if they were cut directly before the motif, the sketchbooks prove that many preparatory studies were required to achieve a topographically more or less exact impression of nature on the reversive print image. However, it was mostly just the defining contour lines of mountain ranges that he took from the notes he drew in a shorthand way, to then immerse in the intuition of the moment and his eidetic memory while cutting. The latter then often gave him an intensified, dramatizing impression of the sceneries.

 

Linton: The Lake Country Sketchbook. 1863 (MePri-Collection)

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

Eliza Lynn / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

Linton: The Flower and the Star and other Stories for Children. Boston 1868

Sketch Revolts

With the poetic expressiveness of his landscape depictions and the impression of directness, Linton complied with a demand which his fatherly friend, the republican cultural theorist and industrialist William Bridges Adams, had already formulated in 1833. In his first contribution to William Johnson Fox’s The Monthly Repository, he had called for an expressive type of engraving, the products of which – if made with a poetic spirit and under the impression of direct inspiration – would no longer be “wooden-looking”. Such an artistic type of graphic reproduction should be preferred, already because of the large dissemination of elitist products of painting.10

Adam’s early avant-garde views had developed in a similar environment influenced by Saint Simonism and Byronism, which had also shaped the artistic and political opinions of Mazzini, who was a few years younger.11 Giuseppe Mazzini’s outstanding significance for the art of his times consisted in his attributing it with a political imperative of action in a messianic way. He saw the special task of art in “encouraging people to translate their thoughts into action.”12 It is obvious that with his artistic followers this emphasis on action, which gave him the title of a “prophet of action”, could result in a way of thinking that declared directness in the process of artistic creativity itself a programme. At the same time as Linton was working in the Lakes on a direct translation of landscape impressions in the field of graphic reproduction, in Florence a group of artistic supporters of Mazzini came together and declared the painterly sketch, the macchia, the actual content of their art. Many of them, including the most famous such as Giuseppe Abbati, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and Telemaco Signorini, had been involved as guerrillas or regular combatants in the unification wars. For them the term under which they had gathered was associated with a wide range of meanings. Firstly, with a proto-Impressionist artistic approach, and then with a national, republican landscape ideal, as well as with a conspiratorial, partisan self-understanding. For the macchia designates the spot, the stain, the blemish, but also a bush, as well as the characteristically wild brushwood landscape of Tuscany, the Macchie, which was the subject of numerous landscape paintings of the Macchiaoli. With this Mediterranean formation of vegetation that spreads from Tuscany to Sicily, in turn, a number of further, subversive sets of concepts from the criminal and partisan milieu were associated, e.g., forgery (battere moneta alla macchia), illegal printing (stampare alla macchia), hiding in the woods (fare alla macchia), and living as an outlaw (vivere alla macchia).13

In 1849 Linton and his large family moved to Brantwood at Coniston Water in the Lake District, and the life he led there was fully in line with the concept and ideology of the Macchiaoli. After the disappointments of the uprisings of ’48 and the imminent decline of the Chartist land reform movement, his rural move did not lead to diminished political activities, but instead to their expansion. Brantwood, which already from afar revealed itself through the slogans of Mazzini that decorated the walls as the English quarter of the Risorgimento movement,14 was planned – like later on Montana in the United States – as a life-reforming nucleus (macchia) of a free republic.15 It was a conspiratorial meeting place for international patriots, a printing workshop for revolutionary propaganda (stampare alla macchia) and, above all, a laboratory for a new form of antiauthoritarian education modelled on Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Visitors regarded his children as unkempt savages and Linton himself as an outlaw and tramp. Eliza Lynn’s biographer described the situation as a vivere alla macchia and fare alla macchia in the style of an early hippie commune.16

Martineau / Linton: The English Lakes. London 1858

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

Although Linton was associated with the Italian unification movement via a number of supporting campaigns and had contacts through both Mazzini and the Rossetti brothers, there is no proof of any connections to the Macciaioli. The artistic frames of reference were all too different. Linton’s striving for renewal was not aimed at painting but at illustration and press graphics, the artistic upgrading of which utilitarian English radicalism had given priority for educational-ethical reasons. In Linton’s view, ordinary illustration graphic was an imposition and he found the contemporary practice of wood engraving to be stereotyped and overrefined in its increasing proximity to copperplate engraving.

Already the exterior frame in which Linton had developed the Lake engravings made it clear that they did not refer to the industrialised standard of the time, but to the early days of xylography, to the still popular graphics of the early Bewick school.17 As Thomas Bewick’s famous animal encyclopaedia illustrations, many of Linton’s landscape depictions were single block engravings, which on the white of the paper preferably opened up in the form of an edgeless oval, comparable with the pinhole photographs of early cameras. Tom Lubbock drew a parallel between the hallucinatory effects of Bewick’s vignette art and the projections of a laterna magica. By isolating the miniature scenes without a frame on the paper ground, Lubbock stated, Bewick abolished the classical, partial window view of the Renaissance.18

Thomas Bewick: A General History of Quadrupeds. Newcastle 1790 (reprinted by Linton in 1889)

For Linton, the simplicity and inventiveness of Bewick’s white-line technique was an ideal to which any form of an artistic renewal of xylography had to revert, for the works of the early Bewick school were not yet corrupted by the division of labour and mechanisation, but counted as examples of creatively handling the technology. However, the rural idyll that Bewick had evoked in his engravings represented precisely the prettified picture of old paternalistic England that Linton and Duncan had attacked with their Agricultural Pictures. Accordingly, Bewick’s animal encyclopaedia illustrations were monopolized soon after their publication by feudal romantics in England and abroad, among others, by the Weimar privy councillor, von Goethe, and his artistic advisor, Johann Heinrich Meyer, who recommended Bewick’s engravings particularly for their cuteness and pleasantness.19 In his history of xylography, The Masters of Wood Engraving, Linton characterised this loyalist signature with the slightly contemptuous attribute of homely, and in doing so he not only referred to the ideal, old-fashioned world of Bewick’s engravings but also to the slightly naive style of drawing and engraving. He countered this with a greater keenness of observation, increased directness in the graphic translation and a larger variability in the engraving work. The difference between the increased expressive value that Linton strived for and that he described with the two pithy terms of boldness and vigorousness, and early wood engraving is strikingly revealed in the comparison of different conceptions and ways of handling the landscape vignette.

Although the vignettes of the Bewick school, especially the highly imaginative tailpieces, usually depict lively sceneries full of action, they are characterised by the impression of a distance to time and of static that they convey. Tom Lubbock regards the Bewickian vignette depictions as “the opposite of a glimpse: a fixated vision.”20 Linton’s landscape engravings, on the other hand, do not want to open up distant, frozen, miniature worlds of the sort of Bewick’s snow dome universe. Here, the oval shape of a scenery does not define a stabilising prospect but a moveable, ocular field of vision. As opposed to Bewick’s depictions, the impression of transitoriness plays a crucial role in Linton’s landscape art. His vignettes are ephemeral, atmospheric units, graphical spots that transport the freshness of the first impression.

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

Martineau / Linton: The English Lakes. London 1858

Eliza Lynn Linton / Linton : The Lake Country 1864

In his essay, Una teoria della macchia (1905), the art philosopher Benedetto Croce quotes from an essay by the Italian art critic Vittorio Imbriani from 1868, in which he defined the macchia in the style of Linton’s vignettes as “the result of the first, fleeting impression, be it of an object or a scene; the first characteristic effect that makes an impression on the eye of the artist.”21 Croce himself described the macchia as a pictorial nucleus and drew a parallel to the literary moment of direct poetic inspiration. In face of William Bridges Adam’s early call for an expressive illustration art created under the impression of direct inspiration and Mazzini’s actionist appeal, it becomes clear that the concept of macchia in the republican context of the 19th century can not at all be limited to Italy and the medium of painting.

In the direct dealing with the lexical illustrations of the Bewick school, the complex of Linton’s Lake Country engravings marks an artistic paradigm shift comparable to the one that took place when the Barbizon school and the Macchiaioli replaced the painting traditions of late classicism and the Biedermeier. As opposed to the retinal revolution of the Impressionists, which was still a decade in coming and represented an apotheosis of bourgeois escapism, these early sketch revolts were explicitly politically motivated and founded in a partisan way. As the American art historian Albert Boime stresses, these artists were “self-professed ‘outlaw-sketchers’ – a term the Impressionists, bent on achieving social legitimation, could never have accepted for themselves.”22

In the framework of Linton’s illustrational work, the Lake phase, with its intensive observation of nature, marks a highlight and turning point. After his emigration to North America, which was soon to follow, he recommended himself with the example of the Lake engravings as the leading landscape xylographer of his times and became the most significant graphic interpreter of the Hudson River School.23 Within the monumental Picturesque America project in the early 1870s, he was decisively involved in this “first publication to celebrate the entire continental nation […] to construct a national self-image based on reconciliation between North and South and incorporation of the West.” 24

W.C. Bryant ed. : Picturesque America or, the Land we live in. New York 1872 (French Edition,  Paris 1880)

 

Notes:

1) John P. Davis in: The Century Magazine, Vol. 38, August 1889

2) Comte de Volney: Les Ruines Ou Méditations Sur Les Révolutions Des Empires, Genève 1791

3) The hymn The Gathering of the People (Storm Song) was printed in 1848, among others, in Linton’s and George Holyoake’s Journal The Cause of the People, in C.G. Harding’s The Republican, and in 1850 in the first series of Linton’s The English Republic.

4) W.J. Linton: Threescore and Ten years. Recollections. New York 1894, p. 91

5) In 1980 John Barrell dedicated a seminal study to the theme, which, however does not take the period of the Chartist land reform into account anymore: The Dark Side of the Landscape. The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge 1980) / In 1860 Linton did an engraving of a painting by George Morland, The Old Horse, in the framework of his reproduction-graphic compendium, Thirty Pictures by deceased British Artists by W.J. Linton (London 1860). One can also find a xylographic interpretation of Henry Liverseege’s genre painting Cobbett’s Register.

6) The Lake sketchbook in the Linton-Archive is in pocket format (13 x 8 cm) and has 130 pages.

7) Eliza Lynn had signed the book contract with the publisher in February 1863.

8) William Gilpin, who can be regarded as the initiator of the picturesque movement, was born in Cumbria, at the edge of the Lakes. One of his early illustrated travel reports is dedicated to the Lake District: Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the year 1772, on several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland. (2 vol.)

9) John P. Davis in: The Century Magazine, Vol. 38, August 1889

10) William Bridges Adams: “On the State of the Fine Arts in England,” in: The Monthly Repository, January 1833: “Time was that engravings were mere daubs, wretched wooden – looking things (…) I could wish that the art of painter and engraver were always combined, as those of physician and chemist should ever be. The editor of the Black Dwarf ( i.e. the radical Thomas Wooler) used to set his types direct from his brain, without the intervention of a MS.; and engravers, being endowed with the genius of poetry, starting into design, might strike out many felicitous things by those flashes of the spirit, designated sudden inspiration ; and, at any rate, their hands would thus acquire greater freedom of execution.”

11) In 1847 W.B. Adams was among the founding members of The People’s International League initiated by Mazzini.

12) Cited in: Carlotta Sorba: Communicare con il popolo, p. 78 in: Christopher Alan Bayly, Eugenio F. Biagini ed.: Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, Oxford 2008,

13) Albert Boime: The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, Chicago 1993. p.102 ff.

14) Mazzini’s slogans of the Risorgomento, Ora e sempre and God and the People, that decorated the walls of Brantwood were removed by the subsequent owner of the estate.

15) In 1871 he was an agent of the socialist-minded entrepreneur Edmund Davis involved in plans intending to establish an English colony “as republican nucleus” in Montana.

16) In his biography of Eliza Lynn, George Somes Layard compared the living conditions in Brantwood with the chaotic and dirty conditions in the “wigwam of a Cherokee Indian.” (Mrs Lynn Linton Her Life Letters & Opinions, London 1901)

17) Among Thomas Bewick’s relevant works illustrated in the style of vignettes are A General History of Quadrupeds, Newcastle 1790, and History of British Birds, Newcastle 1797.

18) Tom Lubbock: Defining the Vignette, p. 44, in: Jonathan Watkins ed.: Thomas Bewick. Tale-Pieces. Birmingham 2009

19) In 1798, the Swiss art writer Johann Heinrich Meyer characterised Thomas Bewick’s wood engravings in the Propyläen edited by Goethe as “delicate, cute, pleasant.”

20) Tom Lubbock: Defining the Vignette, p. 48, in: Jonathan Watkins ed.: Thomas Bewick. Tale-Pieces. Birmingham 2009

21) Vittorio Imbriani: La Quinta Promotrice, Naples 1868, in: Benedetto Croce: Una teoria della macchia, Bari 1940

22) Albert Boime: The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, Chicago 1993. p.12

23) Linton’s large-format engravings after paintings by John A. Hows and Thomas Moran appeared at the beginning of the 1870s, among others, in the early American art magazine The Aldine, A Typographic Art Journal.

24) Sue Rainey in her study on Picturesque America or, the Land we Live in. A Delineation by Pen and Pencil. (2 Vol.) New York 1872: Creating Picturesque America. Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape. Nashville-London 1994

(Translation: Karl Hoffmann)