Dover Castle from a Market Stall on Castle Street
Description:
A woman in a black cloak with a young bonneted girl behind her stands in a covered, open-air market filled with baskets of fruits and fresh goods. The woman grips a large basket of grapes and looks toward someone who appears to be a young boy. This short figure, perhaps the store attendant—in a beige coat, black beret and brown boots—has turned his back to the viewer. A dirt road flanked on both sides by one-story homes runs from the back of the market into the distance. Two figures (difficult to see as they are faded in the watercolor) wear top hats and ride down the road in a black carriage. In the far background above the line of residences, a castle sits on a broad hill. Its grounds are extensive and cover the entire breadth of the hill. A crenellated tower with a white flag stands in the middle of the castle complex.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Accession Number:
2001.45
Height (in centimeters):
33
Width (in centimeters):
39
Provenance
Edward Blake Blair Endowment Fund purchase, Chazen MuseumMarks Description
Inscription, lower right, in script: 18515 FASAssociated Places
Dover CastleAssociated Texts
The following are found in William Batcheller's The New Dover Guide, Including a Concise Sketch of the Ancient and Modern History of the Town and Castle and such Other General Information as may be Useful to Visitors; and a Short Description of the Neighboring Villages (4th ed., 1838):Subject
In this image, the centrality of Dover Castle and its integration into the surrounding landscape demonstrates the centrality of medieval structures in constructing national identity during the Romantic era.Significance
Commenting on Romantic ruin painting, Louis Hawes states that medieval ruins were popular subjects for topographical artists and watercolorists. Indeed, the portfolios of Samuel Prout and Samuel and Nathaniel Buck—trained topographers of the Romantic era—all include medieval ruins. Hawes further observes that artists of architectural decay also tend to position their ruins in the middle ground (462). This again is true of several of the aquatints based on William Gilpin’s picturesque drawing of ruins—for example, the ruins of Castle Abergavenny (William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye... 1792. Plate 12). The London topographer George S. Shepherd fits the first characterization, but not the second. His Dover Castle recedes into the background, and the castle, the hill, and the road (slightly more pink) are all colored with the same wash.Over and about these ruins I . . . meditated . . . [on] the great improvements of the roads, which have introduced learning and the arts into the country and removed the (formerly wretched) families, who buried themselves in mud and ignorance, to the gay participation of wit and gallantry in the parishes [towns] of Marylebone and St. James! (89)Commenting on the ruined Caraig-cennin Castle in Wales, traveler Henry Penruddocke Wyndham declared: "'This was doubtless . . . a British building, as is evident from its plan and the style of its architecture’" (quoted in Mavor 343). Furthermore, the picturesque aesthetic glorified decayed structures from the medieval period because they had been subsumed by the land, stained, overrun and rent by insects and vegetation (Ruskin qtd. in Lowenthal 157). While Dover Castle is not clearly depicted as a ruin, this perspective of Dover Castle emphasizes the union of architecture with land, a source of historic pride wholly integrated into English soil.
Bibliography
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Stanford: Stanford UP. 1989. Print.Long Title
Dover Castle from a Market Stall on Castle StreetFeatured in Exhibit:
From the Collection:
Painter:
Image Date:
1835