Jane Austen and George Stubbs: Two Speculations
Alistair M. Duckworth, University of Florida
Volume 13, no. 1, October 2000
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Unlike Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, and other novelists in her time, Jane Austen does not refer directly to painters to help readers visualize her scenes. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radcliffe refers to Salvator Rosa in her description of the Pyrenees and, in Waverley (1814), Scott refers to Rosa in describing the highland lair of Donald Bane Lane, to Poussin in describing Flora MacIvor’s romantic bower, and to Raeburn in describing the painting of Fergus MacIvor and Waverley, standing resplendent in highland dress against a wild mountainous background. Such is not Austen’s mode; but if specific painterly references are absent from her fictional descriptions, more general visual allusions, though not frequent, are to be found. We know from her brother Henry’s “biographical notice” to the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818) that “at a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque” (p. 7), and as several scholars have shown, William Gilpin plays a significant role not only in the minor works, where he is mentioned by name, but also in the novels, where he is not. Two of Fanny Price’s three “transparencies” in the window of the East Room at Mansfield Park are surely of Gilpin’s aquatints: “Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland” (p. 152). In Sense and Sensibility (1811) Marianne Dashwood deplores the fact that “admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Every body pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was” (p. 97). But if Gilpin is here silently exempted from the excesses of his followers, the picturesque nevertheless comes off badly in Marianne’s debate with Edward Ferrars. Disingenuously claiming to “know nothing of the picturesque,” Edward reveals a detailed awareness of Gilpin’s writings and drawings, as well as of the formulaic descriptions of “blasted trees” and “banditti” found in gothic novels (pp. 96-98).
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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