| Method | Oil on canvas |
| Artist | Michael Angelo Rooker |
| Published | [c. 1770] |
| Dimensions | Image 550 x 685 mm, Frame 690 x 820 mm |
| Notes |
An unrecorded oil painting of Merton College Tower by the British landscape painter Michael Angelo Rooker. The painting, an important and atmospheric addition to Rooker's oeuvre, has recently been authenticated by Patrick Conner, author of the 1984 monograph of Rooker's work. The painting shows the yard behind the rear facades of the buildings that once stood at 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 Magpie Lane. At the time of Rooker's view, the buildings were in a state of dilapidation, though local tradition held that they had once been home to one of, if not the, earliest printing presses in England. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the buildings went through numerous remodellings. The buildings on Merton Lane next to Beam Hall were rebuilt in the 1880s, with the remaining structures on Magpie Lane demolished in the 1960s and replaced with Corpus Christi student accommodation. The buildings of Merton College were a subject that Rooker returned to a number of times, most famously for the Oxford Almanacks of 1772 and 1788, though only the former was painted in oil, completed the year before publication and now in the collection of the Yale Centre for British Art. It shows the northern face of the College and Chapel, looking along Merton Lane towards Corpus Christi College in the distance. Like the current painting, Rooker's interests in the interaction between Town and Gown is clearly apparent, with scholars and gentlemen joined by a pair of servants beating a carpet on the College wall, a groom leaning against his horses while a porter unloads a carriage by the College gate, and a pair of dogs fighting in the street. Although most likely painted at a similar time in the artist's career, the treatment of the College buildings in particular are quite different between the two paintings. The Almanack scene is unquestionably the more austere of the two, focusing much more on a formal architectural study of the College buildings. In the current painting though, Rooker uses Merton Tower as a backdrop, firmly positioning the scene in Oxford, but focusing the viewer's attention on the lesser seen and lesser shown day-to-day life of the University City. The semi-ruinous buildings of the yard are treated with as much care and attention to detail as their grander neighbours, with clothes lines and wisps of smokes from the ancient chimney stacks hinting at the lives of the inhabitants therein. Although the scene has previously been described as representing a stonemasons yard, likely due to the pile of rubble in the foreground and the stack of dressed blocks to the right, there is no evidence for such a use at this site. Comparisons to other views of the same part of the city by Malchair, Buckler, and Pugin suggest that the buildings around the periphery of the yard were a subject for extensive urban renewal at the time of Rooker's painting, so it is tempting to suggest that the action of the scene represents part of this renewal. The dressed stone is almost certainly a ruined building or boundary wall, rather than a stonemason's store, and the rubble pile at centre being worked on by a trio of labourers looks more likely to have belonged to the collapsed wall of the tall flat-roofed building to the left of the scene, which, by the time Pugin's view was published in Ackermann's History of the University of Oxford in 1814, had been lowered, reroofed, and refaced on the Magpie Lane side. Rooker's works sit within a period of intense academic and popular interest in the aesthetic and historical value of ruined structures. In response to the fascination for classical ruins fostered by the Grand Tour, British artists and antiquarians increasingly turned to examples of native English architecture in the form of ruined abbeys, vernacular medieval buildings, and the finer surviving examples of the Gothic style. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, opinion was divided along aesthetic lines into those who preferred a more restrained, precise, and 'scientific' approach to the recording of ruined antiquities and those who ascribed to the harmonious and idealistic Picturesque style championed by the Reverend William Gilpin. Delicately and accurately painted, the current example is a superb emblem for Rooker's approach to the growth in popularity of the Picturesque movement. Rooker's style, placing such an emphasis on realism, has led Conner to describe him as 'contra Gilpin,' and certainly his interest in the mundane as well as the grandiose keeps his scenes far more grounded than the romanticized views of Gilpin and his acolytes. This is not to say though that Rooker did not also look for the picturesque in his scenes. Instead his use of pleasing perspectives and his juxtaposition of the low with the lofty elevates the atmosphere of the ruins and architecture he depicts without sacrificing scientific observation. The result in this case is a wholly unexpected and novel perspective of this part of Oxford. Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801) was a British watercolour painter, scene designer and printmaker. The son of the artist and pantomime actor Edward Rooker and his wife Elizabeth Coatham, he used the middle name "Angelo" consistently from the 1760s after being given the nickname by the artist Paul Sandby to whom he was apprenticed. As a boy he entered into drawing competitions organised by the Society of Arts and by the 1763 he started regularly exhibiting at the Society of Artists. All of his early works were drawings and watercolours. In 1768, he was admitted to the School of the Royal Academy and became ARA in 1770. During his time at the School, he focused on painting in oils but continued working in watercolours. Rooker gave up oil painting after 1779 when he last exhibited oil paintings at the Royal Academy. Rooker continued to supply drawings and engravings for a number of publications including the Copper Plate Magazine. For twenty years Michael Angelo Rooker provided the images for the Oxford Almanack and worked with his father Edward on them until Edward's death in 1774 from whence Michael carried on providing the original image and the engraving. Rooker was appointed the scene painter at the Haymarket Theatre at the end of the 1770s and while is it debatable as to why, his drawing and engraving output declined. After Rooker's death in 1801 there was a sale at Squibb of his paintings, drawings, and personal collection of prints. Provenance: London, John Mitchell & Son, 1961. Private collection until 2018. Exhibited at Abbott & Holder 2018. Patrick Conner, author of Michael Angelo Rooker ARA 1746-1801 (V&A, 1984) has confirmed the authenticity of this painting on 28.11.2018. Ref: Patrick Conner, Michael Angelo Rooker ARA 1746-1801 (V&A, 1984). |
| Framing | framed |
| Price | £22,500.00 |
| Stock ID | 51918 |