The August Moon, by Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882). 1880. Oil on canvas; 66 1/2 x 119 7/8 inches (168.9 x 304.5 cm). Collection of Tate Britain, reference no. NO1142. Image kindly released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) Licence. [Click on both the images to enlarge them.]
A catalogue of the holdings of the Tate Gallery, published in 1900, describes the picture like this: "View in the outskirts of a forest, overlooking a marshy valley or meadows which appear to have been recently flooded, with wooded hills in the distance. A full moon has just risen from the horizon. Scotch fir trees and felled timber in the foreground. This picture was painted at Blackdown, in the neighbourhood of Haselmere, Surrey" (117-18).
The August Moon was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880 no. 20 and then later at Lawson's posthumous retrospective exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery Winter Exhibition in 1882-83, no. 236. It was painted at Blackdown, near Haselmere, in Surrey. Lawson himself explained his reasons for painting this work: "My aim has been to produce the effect of the autumn golden moon rising over an English landscape before the daylight has quite disappeared and the moon has asserted its full power. The principal features in the foreground are three Scotch firs, through which you look down into marsh lands where cattle browse, and beyond a wooded valley, the distant Sussex downs, which form the line of the horizon" (13). Lawson's long-time friend Heseltine Owen visited the spot where the subject was painted one night with Lawson: "Nothing would satisfy him but that we should drive over together to see the moon rise over Blackdown, close to the Laureate's place, the point his picture was chiefly studied from. By the time we reached Blackdown, close on midnight, the moon was high in the heavens. I remember Lawson enlarging on the colour there was always in a landscape in such moonlight. He said that no great painter had yet fully grasped this truth, but that he intended to show it" (69-70) Lawson later painted out an owl in the foreground as the result of the critics' disapproval of the "weird bird." There is an obvious pentimento seen in the mid region of the first fir tree on the left where the owl has been painted over.
Closer view of the marshy area and the distant cattle, over which the moon shines.
Donato Esposito has described this picture as "a conscious reaction to his earlier, more detailed and closely observed transcriptions of nature. Dark trees frame the view to either side of the moonlight composition, in an attempt at pure formalism" (128). At the time of its initial appearance at the Grosvenor the reviewer for The Architect praised its novelty and scale:
Mr. Cecil Lawson challenges criticism by the novelty of his style and the scale of his performances. The August Moon and The Voice of the Cuckoo measure not by feet but yards. The scenery in both pictures is essentially English, and seems to be richly-wooded country in Surrey, where you get foliage of various character, notably beach, fir, oak, and birch, and delightful breaking of the ground into hill and dale, upland and covert. In the moonlight landscape Mr. Lawson has availed himself of the accident of water left in the valley by flooding, the only element the scene wanted for beauty. Very successful we think the young painter has been with this "night scene." There is a slumbrous depth in the masses of wood, and the blue hills, where daylight lingers yet, are far away and dreamy. The foreground of undergrowth and fern, with angular fir trees spreading dark arms against the sky, is largely put in. The view is taken from the slope of a hill, and the eye carries down and over the wide valley below. The perspective is not easy, and we do not feel clear that Mr. Lawson is perfectly true in his relative scales. There are cattle on the level, and it seems to us that either they are too large or the trees are too small; neither is one quite sure of the depth between foreground and valley. Nevertheless this is a fine picture, and a credit to our landscape school…We are the more glad to give this tribute, as last year we thought Mr. Lawson was going to be led away by a knack of incoherent effectiveness, the end of which would have been chaos. If he will clear his palette and continue to study with more observant patience the Nature he loves, we see a brave future for this clever artist. [333]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum praised the picture while at the same time feeling Lawson relied too heavily on Old Master prototypes and straying a little too far from nature itself
:If Mr. C. Lawson would take nature into his confidence and, by diligent studies, enlarge his knowledge, he might so elevate his taste and cultivate considerable gifts of which he has but too easily made capital, that he would be able to express happily more than he has yet contrived to give us. It would not be difficult to avoid the dingy and heavy tones, the opaqueness, and the entirely unnatural execution of The August Moon (20), in which a fine and noble, if not very original, idea is smothered in paint. It is a large view of a broad valley, of pastures, waters reflecting a shining sky, and trees, the whole as seen from an elevated foreground. There is more beauty in the distance and the glowing, if not vivid, sky of the companion picture, which is called The Voice of the Cuckoo (23)… It may be permitted to say that the courage of Mr. Lawson has, perhaps, led him a little too far from nature in these works. Justly self-reliant, he appears to have taken as artistic types those landscapes which, as they now appear, are questionably attributed to Titian, or to Tintoret, or even to Rubens. Can he forgotten that time has wrought wonderful changes in those masterpieces, and that while nature has renewed herself, she has not renewed them? There is nothing, here or elsewhere, to be compared with these large pictures. They prove Mr. Lawson to be not only one of the most original masters, but the most courageous. [606]
A critic for The Magazine of Art failed to find beauty in this composition:
Mr. Cecil Lawson produces every season some suggestive and complete impressionary landscape work of a high quality, generally on a small scale; but he is also represented every year by immense panoramic canvases, full of tormented detail and containing no features on which the eye can rest in peace or pleasure… In The August Moon - a picture painted at Blackdown, Haslemere, the place of the Poet Laureate's summer residence – the moon itself is too exaggeratedly large; we do not require that the size should be absolutely correct according to relative measurement, for the eye requires a somewhat heroic treatment of all the celestial luminaries, but when fact is thus legitimately set aside, an artist's instinct should tell him where to stop. The painter of 'The Morning After' is certainly capable of far straighter, sincerer, and more impulsive work than he has shown us this year. [476]
The Portfolio praised the picture, particularly its colour: "Mr. Cecil Lawson, in his August Moon, gives us a picture of nature in a poetic hour, when in the hollow of an undulating landscape a shallow stream is seen reflecting the light of the harvest moon, while over the surrounding wooded heights a silvery light is slowly suffusing itself" (104). The critic of The Spectator greatly disliked the painting, however, savaging it in his review: "With the mention of the two big landscapes by Mr. Cecil Lawson, which occupy the end of the great west gallery, we shall conclude this our first notice. These pictures of the Weald of Surrey and another landscape whose name we have forgotten, are quite the worst things which Mr. Lawson has yet exhibited, and show very clearly that the artist is being, like most successful young artists, spoiled. The picture of Surrey is a dusky moonlight scene, very large and dark and misty, but without any beauty other than that of a big scene-painting, – a nice effect, boldly treated, but not a great picture, and hardly worthy of a place in the gallery. It would have been just as bad or as good, if it had been a tenth part of the size" (622). The Saturday Review at least found the painting more pleasing: "Among the landscapes and figure pictures two large landscapes, The August Moon (20), and The Voice of the Cuckoo (23), by Mr. Cecil Lawson, occupy a prominent place. The general effect of the former of these is undeniably pleasing, although it is perhaps equally undeniable that the strangely enormous moon, which is supposed to cast over the scene the light which is great part of its attraction, has in itself no luminosity" (559).
Bibliography
"Art. The Grosvenor Gallery." The Spectator LIII (May 15, 1880): 621-22.
"Art Chronicle." The Portfolio XI (1880): 103-08.
Blackburn, Henry. Grosvenor Notes May 1880. London: Chatto and Windus, 1880.
Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Pictures and Sculptures in the National Gallery of British Art. Seventh Edition. London: Tate Gallery, 1900. 117-18.
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017. Chapter 5, 126-28.
"The Grosvenor Gallery. – II." The Architect XXIII (15 May 1880: 332-33.
Owen, Heseltine. "In Memoriam: Cecil Gordon Lawson." The Magazine of Art XVII (1894): 1-6, 64-70.
"Pictures of the Year." The Magazine of Art III (1880): 474-80.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Grosvenor Gallery." The Athenaeum No. 2741 (8 May 1880): 605-07.
"The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition." The Art Journal New Series XIX 1880: 188.
The Picture Galleries –II." The Saturday Review XLIX (May 8, 1880): 559-60.
Created 14 June 2023