Time with Turner’s gentle friend

Rupert Christiansen advises everyone to take any excuse to visit the Barber Institute in Edgbaston.

Take any excuse you can to visit the Barber Institute. Situated in Edgbaston on the University of Birmingham campus, it contains one of our finest regional art collections, beautifully housed in a tranquil setting and displaying a small number of paintings and objets d’art, all of a very high quality, without intrusive labelling or gimmickry.

An additional attraction at the moment is the small exhibition In Front of Nature: The European Landscapes of Thomas Fearnley (until January 27), which will afford you a happy half-hour of browsing.

A Norwegian of English descent, Fearnley flourished at the same time as Constable and Turner, to whose superior genius his talent offers interesting comparisons.

Perhaps his most famous picture today is the little oil sketch he made of Turner standing on a bench on varnishing day at the British Institution, but this is untypical of his subject matter. His genre was landscape, treated in a warm and fluent but objective style that evokes for me the opening movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony”.

Landscape for Fearnley was neither menacing nor daunting. The Romantic sublime of Caspar David Friedrich – another of his contemporaries – is not his style, and even his superb picture of the Grindelwald Glacier seems without any rhetoric of awe. Wordsworth’s Lake District was a terrain he saw as a working rural environment rather than a source of epic scenic grandeur, and his depictions of Derwentwater and Rydal have fresh bucolic charm.

Fearnley’s modesty made him popular in his lifetime: when he showed his work in London in the mid 1830s, he was preferred by several critics to Turner, who was deemed excessive and outré. Nowadays taste has decisively reversed in Turner’s favour, and at first glance Fearnley’s gentle paintings can look as though they belong in a Victorian parlour next to the aspidistra. But look a little longer and their quiet grace and harmony suggests someone happily absorbed in nature but not overwhelmed by it.

Fearnley spent much of his adult life travelling restlessly through Europe. He was no Byronic sociopath, however – rather, a convivial, back-slapping sort of a fellow who enjoyed a smoke and a jar. Below a self-portrait picturing himself indulging in both these pleasures, he writes the rubric, “An artist without a drink is like a ship without sails”: an appropriate motto, perhaps, for the coats of arms of several of today’s bibulous YBAs.