Published in Paintings of Petworth, exhibition catalogue, Gillian Jason Gallery, 1993
HARD UPON THE LENGTHY and arduous pilgrimage that kept him on the road for so much of the 1980's making drawings of all the cathedrals and greater churches of England, and then as many as possible of those of France, Dennis Creffield was invited by the National Trust's Foundation for Art to work at a number of the Trust's properties around the country and, in particular chose Petworth House. The thought was simply to go down to Sussex for a matter of days in the spring of 1991, to make a few drawings and perhaps a painting or two. And Creffield, in the grand manner of the artist drawn inexorably into his subject, stayed for the better part of a year, working in all weathers through the autumn and bitter winter, his caravan parked in the courtyard behind the house.
It is a nice thought that left just so by his indirect and disinterested patron, the present Lord Egremont, to get on quietly with his work, he was enjoying something of the same indulgence by which, nearly two centuries ago, the Lord Egremont of the day allowed artists who wished to work at Petworth, to come and go more or less as they pleased. Turner, of course, was the greatest such beneficiary, and his paintings of the landscape of the Park, the sun setting and the deer grazing, hang to this day in the great gallery on the ground floor of the house, that gives out upon that very view.
It is always daunting for the serious artist to find himself treading so precisely in the footsteps of the great. The ghost had to be laid. When Creffield arrived at Petworth, the Old Library, which Turner had used as a studio, was being refurbished. Norman Thomas, the Administrator, showed Creffield another room across the corridor, and suggested that Turner might have painted his views of the park from its window. Creffield decided to make that room into his studio. He had already chosen canvases of precisely the same unusual dimensions as those Turner had used. Finding a conventional easel somewhat awkward at the window, he set the canvas on the window seat itself, built into the wall. To his immediate astonishment he found that his canvas was an exact fit, and that its necessary tilt allowed eye and hand the perfect working circumstance, canvas to landscape, up and down, left to right. Here was confirmation of Thomas's suspicion. The configuration of the landscape was exactly as Turner had seen and painted it. And here Creffield was, with the ghost as it were at his shoulder, working at the very spot.
Creffield is nothing if not his own man, yet it needed, perhaps, a surprise of this order to break a natural and understandable inhibition. There was never any question of any direct following or pastiche, but the possibility even of more discreet an 'homage' was given over, as Creffield's own painterly imperatives took hold. His characteristic approach in these Turner views, as indeed in all his Petworth work, is of an extremely loosely stated field or ground articulated by a rapid gestural notation that curiously builds up into a very particular, though by no means specific account of the visual experience of the moment. It is, in entirely its own way, a kind of expressionism, immediate in its response, atmospheric and suggestive in its effect. There is nothing to it of close and considered description, and yet there is a real if contradictory sense of the artist looking long and hard, knowing and feeling his subject deeply. Everything is in the act, in the doing, in the painting of it, the sweep of the hand and the mark on the surface. And yet there it all is, the wind blowing the clouds and rooks and leaves across the sky, the mist shrouding the further reaches of the park, with only the flickering, branchy antlers of the deer to animate and inform the scene. Winter and autumn, the clouds gather and lower: the herd masses comfortingly together: the sun goes down in a blaze of glory.
And so, not so much Turner himself as the Turners out of his system, Creffield was free to get on with Petworth at large, both park and house, inside and out. Like Turner, he worked on interior subjects, in particular the two state beds, known still as Mrs Wyndham's and the Belzamine. But the substance of the work was outside, in the park and around the house. It falls into three main groups, the format more or less consistent within each one: the Turner format paintings, looking out from the house across the deer park to the village: the miscellaneous park-scapes: and the largest group of all, the paintings of the back of the house itself, the South End, looking back towards the gatehouse from the East.
The general views, lyrical in feeling and extremely free in the handling, are particular not so much in the locations they might fix as in the experiences to which they relate, taken from Creffield's walks about the park and returning towards the house, with perhaps a storm threatening, or the landscape hazy in the midwinter frost. They are the most overtly abstracted of the works, yet in spirit, in their generalised address to the shifting seasons and their evocation of the palpable mood of the place, they remain very much integral to the oeuvre as a whole.
It is, however, the image of the South End of the house, the imposing yet private and comparatively unprepossessing rear facade, that Creffield has made entirely his own. It is far from obvious, let alone easy a choice of view, with the subject looming up across a fairly narrow space, the perspectives alarmingly forced and foreshortened. The viewer senses himself in a curious way in a narrow street or square, with the cathedral front reared up before him, or pressed against the wall on the far side of the canal to get something of the wider sweep of the cliff-like palazzi, as they rise sheer from the water.
Here with the undress back of the house, Creffield is at last entirely on his own, quite untrammeled by the visual responses of artists before him. And yet what he does with it begins to strike all sorts of chords, chords not of influence or reference at all, but rather of unspoken, intuitive sympathy and participation in a continuing tradition. For, in this broader sense, the precedents in art are honourable ones indeed, that take us on from Turner. We may still think of him, to be sure, as we look at these dense and active, flickering surfaces, not as he was at Petworth at all, but rather as in Venice perhaps, with its mists and vapours, or watching with him from the middle of the Thames as the Houses of Parliament burn to the ground. And in a moment we are moving on by association, again to Venice, but now that of Sargent and Whistler, and of Monet too. And with Monet come the Rouen cathedral paintings, caught in all weathers and times of day, and later still, images of the newer Palace of Westminster, rising cliff-like above the misty river. How strange that paintings of the back-side of a great, ancient house in the heart of the English countryside, though they remain entirely true in spirit to their primary subject, should call to mind, by their powerful suggestibility, qualities of mist and water overhung with noble architecture. In fact it is not strange at all, for all these paintings have done is to set the sympathetic imagination free, which was ever a sovereign test of true art.
Whistler, in his 'Ten O'Clock' lecture said as much: "The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to reorganise the traveller on the top... And when the evening clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night... Nature... sings her exquisite song to the artist alone... Well, not quite alone, Mr Whistler, if the artist takes us with him, into his confidence and into his world.