John Glover

Masterpiece Fine Art, Hobart
Private collection, Tasmania; purchased from the above in 1985 

Society of British Artists, London, 1827, cat. 88
Sotheby's, London, 23 March 1977
Australian Art, Colonial to Modern, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 15-26 April 1985, cat. 3, illus.
Australian Colonial and Impressionist Exhibition, Masterpiece Fine Art Gallery, Hobart, June 1985, cat. 56

Ackermann's Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics (Third Series), vol. IX no. 53, May 1827, p. 301 

RELATED WORKS
Rosslyn Castle, with Chapel, near Edinburgh
Watercolour
11.7 by 15 cm
Painted in 1815
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (62-1894)  

John Glover's high reputation today rests largely on the sensitively observed Colonial Picturesque landscapes that he made in old age, after his migration to Van Diemen's Land in 1831. However, while the Turner-Constable duopoly has since tended to dominate the perception of Regency landscape painting, Glover was also known to his contemporaries as one of the most successful artists in England.

Although not as popular as Wales or the Lake District, Scotland was nevertheless a favourite destination for amateurs of the Picturesque in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Glover first visited in 1803; his submissions to the Royal Academy in 1804 included Cruachen Ben from Dalmally and Trossacks at Loch Catherine, and at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colours the following year, six of his twenty-three pictures were of Scottish subjects. It was clearly profitable territory; a sketchbook note from a later visit records that in a two-month tour he 'made 158 Sketches & 6 Pictures in Oil'.¹

The Collegiate Church of St Michael at Rosslyn has recently attracted enormous popular attention due to its legendary associations with Freemasonry, the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, and its consequent importance in the film of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code – between 2005 and 2006 visitor numbers at the chapel increased five-fold. Yet even in the nineteenth century, Rosslyn Chapel had its fair share of tourists, drawn to the dramatic setting above the North Esk River, to the elaborate stone carvings of the late Gothic interior and to the Romantic associations of the family of the lairds of Rosslyn, 'the lordly line of high St Clair'. Dorothy Wordsworth, visiting in 1807, described its architecture as 'exquisitely beautiful', and Sir Walter Scott refers to its famous sealed vaults in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' (Canto Six, XXIII). Louis Daguerre (later to be celebrated as a pioneer of photography) featured Rosslyn in his multi-media theatrical spectacle, the Diorama, which showed in London in 1826.

It is possible that Glover, an artist ever alert to commercial opportunities, tackled the subject in response to Daguerre's popular success. He exhibited a Rosslyn Castle at the Society of British Artists' annual exhibition in 1826, and this work the following year. He may even have had a Masonic audience in mind. Certainly he numbered among his patrons several prominent British Freemasons, including J.G. Lambton (the Earl of Durham) and Charles, Baron Kinnaird. It is also suggestive that, when President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, Glover conducted committee meetings at the Freemasons' Hotel, while an early sketchbook features an unexplained cartouche with the Egyptian look of eighteenth-century Masonic art. ²

However, in the absence of more concrete evidence to support a Masonic subtext, we must assume that Rosslyn Chapel and Castle is simply a typical and fine example of Glover's British Picturesque. Its structure – a medieval monument on an eminence over a wooded river landscape with distant hills – is characteristically Gloveresque, and can be related to paintings such as Kilgarren Castle, South Wales, c.1820 (M.J.M. Carter Collection, Art Gallery of South Australia), Dinas Bran near Llangollen, 1825 (private collection), or Durham Cathedral, 1838 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).

We are most grateful to David Hansen for providing this catalogue entry. David Hansen was the curator, author and editor of the exhibition and book John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery/Art Exhibitions Australia, 2003.

1. Glover's Sketchbook no. 48, 1825, private collection, U.K.
2. Sketchbook no. 9, c. 1799, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales.