Corfe Castle

Jeremy Gardiner’s Corfe Castle series, in my personal view, is the finest work of art inspired by the ruins of Corfe; certainly, no artist has tried so hard to capture the experience of the site or been so imaginative in his presentation to an audience. Over a period of several years Gardiner has illuminated the colours and transparency of the ruined walls, in addition to recording how their appearance changes with the time of the day, the seasons, and the weather – and, indeed, the memories he has accumulated in a life-long relationship with the castle.

I was immediately reminded of John Piper’s interpretation of ruins. An exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery earlier this spring explained the relationship between his experimental abstractions of the 1930s and the figurative paintings of later decades which we immediately recognise as much-loved ‘Pipers’. Although he soon abandoned abstraction as a style, it taught him how to use colour for symbolic and emotional effect. As a Government War Artist he was instructed to paint bomb-sites hours after the Luftwaffe had struck. Depressed by the overwhelming greyness of the reality of destruction, he searched for colours which seemed to represent an inner spirit and intensified these – the flickers of red, or yellow fragments of decorative plaster of an old church – in his depiction on canvas. It was this abstraction and intensification of colour which gave his masterpieces of the war years their spiritual intensity.

The new colours and textures represented by Gardiner are one element in the ruin’s fertile dialogue with Nature. White-washed and intact, its walls defied the patination of age; standing high and alone on its artificial plinth, the Castle was a deliberate imposition on the landscape. In ruins, it has a more fertile – and vulnerable – relationship. Its walls are now as inseparable from the landscape as the splintered and petrified timbers of a boat abandoned in the sand; indeed, in certain lights the castle seems to be sinking gently into the hillside. But perhaps the greatest change is the sudden transparency of the building. Entering the courtyards or the Keep, are we inside or outside?

The most dramatic consequence of the explosion of Corfe Castle by Cromwell’s engineers was, of course, the creation of a new plan and silhouette which has no relationship to the intentions of its original architects. Many of these fragments are inexplicable, even if we stand on the site with the National Trust guidebook and study the reproduction of Ralph Treswell’s survey of the 1570s. The towers at the entrance gate lurch drunkenly outwards; the single rectangular block of the Keep has become two separate upright walls of miraculous verticality and as we climb the last few paces we are confronted by tumbled, vast, unrecognisable chunks of masonry, as shapeless as blocks of stone in a modern quarry. How does an artist capture this exploded form on a flat sheet of paper or canvas?

The majority of artists – such as the antiquarian brothers, Samuel and Nathaniel Buck – recorded its silhouette from a distance, choosing a perspective which allowed them to encompass the mound and the outer wall within a single frame of vision. Several other artists chose vignettes of the interior, preferring to be atmospheric rather than informative; for example, Grimm’s pen and ink sketch of the arches of the undercroft of the Gloriette made in the autumn of 1790. Gardiner is one of many artists to have recognised that it requires a multiplicity of viewpoints to capture a castle.

Gardiner’s Corfe is a piece of many moods. In the weightless luminosity of an early summer morning we think of the hours of sunshine shimmering ahead; in the dark hours the castle reclaims its sinister presence and we remember the stories of brutality, such as King John’s starvation of twenty-two French knights in its dungeon. That is what comes to my mind; more importantly, it is for each individual viewer to choose. A ruin is not an open-air museum; it is a place for the imagination to run free.

Christopher Woodward