THE FOLIO SOCIETY

The coast of Britain has exhilarated generations of painters, poets and travellers across the years, but only one artist has succeeded in capturing every aspect of their teeming diversity, and in the process enshrined our love affair with the seaside – William Daniell.

Between 1813 and 1823, Daniell embarked on a series of journeys, both on foot and by boat, around the entire 7,500 mile coast of Britain in search of its most picturesque views. The resulting aquatints, unequalled in their portrayal of landscape and light, established the fame of great landmarks like Fingal’s Cave, Beachy Head, Whitby Abbey and St Michael’s Mount, and still evoke the spirit of numerous other dramatic cliffs and headlands, calm and stormy seas, ports and fishing villages, lighthouses and ruined castles, beaches and breakwaters.

It was a time of rapid change: whilst Daniell’s paintings capture the loveliness of the seashore before the creation of sea defences and the advent of unsympathetic urbanisation, there are glimpses of the profound social upheaval and the gathering industrial revolution, such as the first steamship ever to appear in art.

Set side by side with over 100 aquatints from Daniell’s oeuvre are the observations of a host of contemporary travellers: among them Daniell’s companion Richard Ayton, musing on the first generation to retire to the seaside; Fanny Burney cut off by the north Devon tides; Keats, yearning for roast-beef sandwiches in Inverness; and Dorothy Wordsworth admiring the ‘visionary’ beauty of a smoke-wreathed Edinburgh.

‘The pillars on each side, the wave beneath, and the beautiful roof – all surpassed the work of man’ CHARLES BROWN on Fingal’s Cave

Britain in Outline

ROBERT MACFARLANE

Robert Macfarlane, whose most recent book, The Wild Places, explores the few remaining wilderness landscapes of Britain, is fascinated by the beauty and diversity of William Daniell’s early nineteenth-century snapshot of Britain’s coastline.

FOR A DECADE, between 1813 and 1823, the artist–engraver William Daniell travelled clockwise around Britain’s coastline, recording what he saw. He began, perversely, at Land’s End, and he ended, appropriately, at Land’s End. A verb might be coined in his honour:

‘to daniell, v. E19. 1. to engage in a slow, eccentric circumambulation. 2. to conduct a perimeter peregrination.’

It would be a verb that recalled both dawdle and dandle – for Daniell took his time and he stopped where he fancied. It is this capriciousness – combined with remarkable draughtsmanship, and an ambitious scope – that makes Daniell’s images such an extraordinary series.

Sailors often speak of the uncanniness of approaching a well-known landscape from the sea: the mixture of recognition and strangeness that such landfalls effect. A similar experience is induced by seeing Daniell’s aquatints. You are brought to imagine Britain only by its outline. The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame. And what a frame it is! Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from four-hundred-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats. In places, the effect of the tide is barely perceptible. In others there is a tidal range of fifteen metres: enough to submerge and reveal a mansion-house twice daily.

Lovers of the British coastline must be lovers of variety, then, and Daniell was such a person. Move quickly enough between his images, and you experience a flick-book tour of the coast – a crackly early film-reel of Britain’s cusps, in all their contrasts. He catches, for instance, the durability of the hard-rock coasts of north-western Britain: the long fingers of peninsula and sea that lace intricately in those regions (a handclasp speaking of pax between rock and water).

When representing the softer south-east of the country, however, he is alert to the land’s constant ceding to the sea. His art can evoke both the grandeur of igneous cliffs, and the eeriness of oozier littorals.

The other great variable of our coast, of course, is its weather – or rather its weathers. Micro-systems of sunshine and squall blow through and over: weather rarely ‘sets’ on a shoreline, as it might do inland. Daniell was a brilliant meteorological painter, and his pictures record a range of conditions: a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead.

Storm, above all, seems to have compelled Daniell. He adored the vaporous complications of gale. His cloudscapes are fabulous in the old sense of the word: he creates storm-skies resembling lands that you might enter and walk within (see his painting of St Andrews).

Most striking to me is his study of the Flamborough Head lighthouse. The image is implausibly graded, with worlds ramped steeply up behind one another, so that different orders of existence are held in simultaneous comparison. Your eye mounts from the base-rock of the Head itself, past the stricken ship, the sea-birds (whose buckling wings rhyme with the gonfalons of the helpless spectators on the cliffs), up to the vertical of the lighthouse, and on above that still to the scumbled clouds of the storm.

How did Daniell make these images, you long to know. There must have been a good deal of boat-chartering, of scrambling out to awkward headlands and up to viewpoints, in search of the optimum perspective. So much effort . . . a decade of logistics and labour – condensed brilliantly into 308 aquatints. The stormscenes are especially curious in this regard: was Daniell really afloat in such fierce weather when he painted the Flamborough scene?

Turner alleged that he researched his 1842 painting of an imperilled steamboat, Snow Storm, by lashing himself to the mast of a ferry during a winter blizzard. ‘I was sure that I would not survive the experience,’ he wrote famously afterwards, ‘but determined that if I did, I should record it.’ There is no evidence of Daniell having practised such storm-painters’ method acting. We must assume that several of the wilder scenes are confections of experience, recollection and supposition.

There is nothing wrong in this. Coastlines are themselves meetings of worlds. What makes them remarkable is their ability to tilt or slip between the elemental (the irrefutably there) and the mythical (the dreamed-of, the mystical).The best artistic littoralists – whether painters, sculptors or writers – have never been literalists.

No, Daniell was not a realist painter in the sense that we might recognise that term. But his work was nevertheless authenticating. His rendering of Loch Coruisq near Loch Scavig – that lost valley on the south-west of Skye – barely resembles the actual topography of the area. But Daniell’s version does evoke the valley’s ability to haunt and intimidate. Walter Scott visited Coruisk in 1814, and described it as ‘dark, brooding, wild, weird and stern’: qualities all visible in Daniell’s rendering. Turner would visit Coruisk in 1831, and his brush would also wobble under the wildness of the scene – he executed a painting in which the Cuillin mountains are distorted into spindly peaks, resembling whipped egg-white more than gabbro.

Daniell is by no means only a romanticist. He is also charismatically attentive to the human life of the shoreline. Crinoline dresses and bonnets might have been replaced by bikinis and sunhats, but Daniell’s images of Essex, Kent and Brighton show that the principles of seaside pleasure have been the same for two centuries: paddling, wandering, dawdling, watching the girls (and boys) go by . . . Alain Corbin, a fine historian of the coast, credits Caspar David Friedrich with having invented the European idea of the seaside in his 1818 paintings of Rügen, a chalk-cliffed resort on the Baltic coast of Germany. But earlier than Friedrich, Daniell was also divining the British coast to be a realm of leisure and eroticism as well as of sublime visions.

A realm of industry, too. Britain’s wealth is in many ways a function of its extensive coastline, and Daniell was clearly fascinated by the hard work of the sea life: dredging, hauling, loading, tugging, shipping. Here you will find steamships as well as stone-age ruins: the ultra-modern co-existing with the picturesquely ancient. Missing only are the great brutalist structures that were fused to our coast during the twentieth century: war defences (anti-tank-blocks, sea-forts) and the vast concrete berms established against that non-human invader, the ocean itself.

To view Daniell’s images of the coastline, then, is not to gaze back onto a lost world – a ghostline. No, it is to see an earlier version of the shore we know today. A place for working and for dreaming. A remarkable collaboration of the industrial, the geological, the natural, the human and the marine.

This is Robert Macfarlane’s preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, a new collection of over a hundred of William Daniell’s aquatints, combined with extracts from his own writings and those of other travellers of the time.