South East View of Kirkstall Abbey, Yorkshire

Maker George Lambert (British, 1710 - 1765)

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date1749

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensionscanvas: 24 1/4 × 31 1/2 in. (61.6 × 80 cm.) frame: 31 1/2 × 39 × 2 3/4 in. (80 × 99.1 × 7 cm.)

SignedSigned and dated lower right: G. Lambert 1749

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Status

Not on view

Label TextLocated on the river Aire near Leeds in the north of England, Kirkstall was founded as a Cistercian abbey by Henry de Lacy, Lord Pontefract, in about 1152. It was dissolved in 1540 and soon fell into a ruinous state. Lambert's choice of the abbey as a promising subject attests to the growing fascination with medieval architectural relics, an enthusiasm fanned by the engravings of ruined castles and abbeys that Samuel and Nathaniel Buck began to publish in 1726. The "cult of the ruin" that would later influence much British art and literature was then still in its infancy. However, the emergence of this taste is already apparent in Lambert's painting, as well as in contemporary descriptions of Kirkstall. After visiting the "awful Ruins" in 1733, Thomas Gent wrote feelingly of "The Eastern Parts embraced by its beloved Ivy; and all about the whole pile desolate, solitary and forelorn!"
It would appear that Lambert modeled this painting on an unlocated picture by Thomas Smith of Derby, which Lambert could have known through an engraving by François Vivares (1709-80), published in January 1747. Lambert's painting makes significant deviations from Vivares's print, however, and these may reflect the dramatic approach to landscape that he developed as a scenery painter at Covent Garden Theatre. The addition of a central tree and the enhanced prominence of the shrubbery create a dark screen through which we glimpse the abbey more obscurely. What the artist conceals of the ruin, as much as what he reveals, piques the viewer's interest and infuses the scene with a subtle note of mystery and suspense.
Lambert further dramatized the mood of the place by enhancing the storminess of the sky. The foreboding gray cloud that rises directly from the top of the tower emphasizes the abbey's impressive height. Lambert draws further attention to the tower by means of the tall, spindly tree in the far left foreground, which he has endowed with a gestural quality that is far more explicit here than in Vivares's print. Lambert draws greater attention to the blasted trunk beside this gestural tree, presenting it in starker isolation so that its shriveled appearance provides a motif of decay equivalent to that of the abbey itself. Throughout the painting, Lambert has used the vague softness of the foliage as a counterpoint to the building's hard, linear definition, which he delineates with uncharacteristic precision.
Most significant of all is the absence of the polite figures that Vivares shows rowing on the water and admiring the ruin from the ground. By replacing this sociable human element with grazing cattle, Lambert creates a more solitary view. Significantly, in a larger version of the present painting, executed two years earlier, the artist had included elegant visitors gazing at the tower, and a rustic figure bathing in the water (Yale Center for British Art). The Huntington painting represents Lambert's reconsideration of those features. With only nature encroaching on the desolate walls of the ruin, the scene appears all the more haunting and evocative.

Bibliography

British paintings at the Huntington

Object number97.15