Corfe Castle
To the artist Paul Nash, writing his Shell Guide to Dorset in the 1930s, ‘Corfe is probably the finest example of a ruin we can show in England, and that is saying much’. It has been painted by artists as good as Nash and J. M. W. Turner, by distinguished topographical draughtsmen such as Samuel Hieronymus Grimm and Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, and by many more forgotten figures such as P. Brannon, H. J. Moule, and the amateur Thomas Weld.
The basis for the Corfe paintings are handmade paper collages which are a response to the texture of the ruined stone walls and their changing reflections of light. Inside his studio, Gardiner sands the paper applying many layers of stained pigment, chalk and translucent washes. When it was built the Castle keep was white-washed, a dazzling assertion of royal authority in a panorama of grass, mud, and thatch. In three centuries of dereliction it has become mottled with lichens, flowers, ivy, and earth. Pick up a photographic postcard of the castle and you will see a single colour to the stone; next time you visit, however, compare the colour of a flat, south-facing surface of the keep which still glitters with the traces of white-wash to that of a grey, damp corner of herring-bone masonry. In actuality, the ruin is a multiplicity of variegated colours and textures, a patchwork from which Gardiner has selected the colours we see in this exhibition.
Seeing the number of painted studies in his studio I was reminded of French artist François-Marius Granet (1775–1849) and the Colosseum. Granet, a native of Aix-en-Provence, travelled to Rome in 1802 and in the years that followed made hundreds of sketches of the arena. In his first few weeks he tried to paint an overall view of the structure from an adjacent hill but it was beyond the young student; an older artist advised him to begin by drawing the Temple of Minerva Medici. This circular, open Roman ruin posed the same challenges on a smaller scale: how to relate inside and outside, combine light and shadow, and adjust to dizzying changes in the point of view. Granet returned to the Colosseum and made hundreds of sketches in ink, pencil and oil in the next few years, but each was only a vignette of a small element of the vast arena, six acres in extent. He recorded the movement of light and shade in the corridors during the course of the day, its changing colour from season to season, and the variety of wild plants – more than 400 species – which had flourished in fifteen centuries of desolation.
What is the connection between Granet’s Colosseum and Gardiner’s Corfe Castle? Each has painted many small studies of the luminosity distilled in old stone; more profoundly, each has recognised that a ruin of this scale can only be recorded as a collage of vignettes if it is to be a truthful record of the artist’s experience of the site rather than simply a postcard-view. In technical terms, Granet was more than competent enough to paint a view which encompassed the whole of the exterior of the structure and which could have been engraved as a print for sale to tourists. For spiritual reasons, however, he chose to return to France with a portfolio of sketches which he never exhibited in many years as a busy professional artist. Whenever he was under the grey skies of Paris and nostalgic for his years as a student in the ruins of Rome, these sketches – like pieces of a mental jigsaw – enabled him to reconstruct the Colosseum in his memory.
Christopher Woodward
