'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

bwleader.com

In April of this year a website concerned with the life and work of the Victorian landscape artist B W Leader RA came into being. It required the cooperation of many of the major Museums and Art Galleries in the UK and some specific galleries in Australia and The United States. On show are some sixty images of his paintings and there is much more to come.

The site should be of interest to those who like to look at a landscape painting, but also to those who have a more specific interest in the subject.

Also shown on the site are a number of books and brochures on his life illustrated by many more of his paintings. Where possible, these books have been reproduced in their entirety and range from works published in his lifetime to much more recent appreciations. In all cases, these are accompanied by comments which may make the information more accessible to the general reader.

Although the primary aim of the site is to provide you all with a pleasurable (not to say, educational) few minutes, there is another issue, which concerns this artists place in the world of landscape painters and their paintings. This is only touched on briefly in the homepage notes and in the biography section.

The benchmark for landscape painters of B W Leaders generation had been set by the renowned artist John Constable, who coincidentally was a guest in B W Leaders father’s house when he was about four years old. While no one doubts Constables immense, not to say ‘overriding’ contribution to this genre, in some quarters his work is considered ‘pretty’ and a portrayal of the British countryside far removed from the harsh reality of the conditions that actually existed.

B W Leader was a ‘working’ artist who had nothing but praise for Constable and was happy to paint in that style, but around 1880 he started to produce paintings that while beautiful in their own right, replaced the prettiness with a far harder edge. The paintings, exemplified by ‘February Fill Dyke’ which hung in The National Gallery achieved immense popularity from the start, and bore little if any similarity to Constables Art. It leads to the inescapable conclusion that B W Leader was the man who at the peak of his career moved landscape painting on from Constable and into the modern era, without reference to Impressionism.

This is a big claim, that will take many years of academic argument to substantiate, but this website may well turn out to be the field on which the battle is fought. Should the argument eventually be accepted, B W Leaders status and consequently the value of his paintings will rise spectacularly, but this is not the prime consideration. It is simply a matter of giving credit where credit is due.

I hope you enjoy the site and take the time to fully explore it. Tell your friends about it and put it on your list of ‘favourites’ as there will be a lot more to look at in the next six months or so.
www.bwleader.com  

 

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