The Startled Rabbit, Warton Crag, Lancashire, by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). c. 1862. Oil on panel. 10 3/8 x 15 1/4 inches (28 x 40.5 cm). Collection of Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead, accession no. BIKGM:1357. Image reproduced here for the purpose of non-commercial research, courtesy of Williamson Art Gallery and Museum via Art UK.
Williamson showed this painting at the first exhibition of the Liverpool Institution in 1863. It is certainly one of the most important of his Pre-Raphaelite landscapes. The scene portrayed is Warton Crag, a limestone hillside above the village of Warton-in-Carnforth in Lancashire, where Williamson was living at the time. The painting is brilliantly coloured having been painted on a white ground and intensely detailed. Ruskin would certainly have appreciated the geological detail of the limestone rocks in the fore- and midground. It is unusual in incorporating two figures into the landscape, a girl and a young man who have apparently been gathering dried bracken. This painting at one time belonged to two of Williamson's principal patrons, John Miller and then James Smith.
Allen Staley has pointed out: "As far as we know, Williamson did paint out of doors directly from nature, and he did intend the pictures as naturalistic studies. These pictures, painted in the early 1860s, represent a late flowering of Pre-Raphaelite naturalism, in which the detail, the clarity, and the bright colours of all become the elements of visionary stylization" (Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 148). Staley saw this work as a genre subject rather than a pure landscape. "A girl and a man carrying a bundle of faggots frighten a rabbit, which bounds away" (148-49).
Christopher Newall has praised the painstaking details incorporated into the painting:
"Williamson's updated painting The Startled Rabbit shows two figures – a young man and a girl – momentarily halted as they watch a rabbit that they have disturbed bounding for cover. The artist has represented a fine autumnal day, with dead bracken covering the ground, and has given painstaking attention to the distinctive limestone terraces (level strata of carboniferous rock, divided into blocks by fissures cut by moisture seeping through the permeable and water-soluble masses.... In the background is seen a stand of conifers, perhaps the same line of trees that occurs in Morecambe Bay – from Warton Crag of 1862" (Staley and Newall 196).
Bibliography
Newall, Christopher. British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750-1950. Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Robert Hooze Ed., 2007, cat. 197, 276-77.
Newall, Christopher. Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. 124.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall. Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 114.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
The Startled Rabbit, Warton Crag, Lancashire. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Created 16 August 2024