ANDREW GASSON ARPS
Cornwall: Then and now The old adage that ‘the camera never lies’ has been superseded by the more recent notion that anything is possible with modern digital editing. In 1851, Wilkie Collins – Victorian author of The Moonstone, The Woman in White and numerous other novels - published Rambles Beyond Railways: or notes in Cornwall taken a-foot. This described his walking tour of Cornwall the previous year and included twelve lithographs by his travelling companion, the young artist Henry Brandling. In his introduction, Collins wrote “On considering where we should go, as pedestrians anxious to walk where fewest strangers had walked before, we found ourselves fairly limited to a choice between Cornwall and Kamchatka - we were patriotic, and selected the former.” In the absence of the railway to Cornwall in 1850 – hence the title of the book - the walking tour for the two travellers started in the east with a boat trip from Plymouth via Saltash to St Germans. Their journey then took a route along the south coast of Cornwall to Land’s End, with excursions inland, returning along the northern coast to end near Tintagel.
Six pairs of images were included in the Landscape Group’s Newsletter for December 2019. It is now possible to reproduce all twelve, presented in the correct order to follow Collins’s original route. Quotations in the text with one exception are taken from the first edition of Rambles. The old adage that ‘the camera never lies’ has been superseded by the more recent notion that anything is possible with modern digital editing. The photographic images are true to the original scenes with no digital additions or subtractions. I hope, when compared to the original lithographs, they will demonstrate that artists – even in the 1850s - employ as much, if not more, licence than photographers.
St Germans Collins and Brandling arrived at St Germans where Brandling produced his first illustration. The view now is remarkably similar to that of 1851. The 13th century Norman church is Grade 1 listed, still standing but no longer covered with foliage. The main house looks very much the same and the tree on the left is perhaps also the original. The viewpoint is now situated on the private Port Eliot estate, requiring permission to enter, and was also chosen to obscure parked cars to the left of the image. On the other hand, alas, there are no longer strolling families with bonnets and top-hats.
On recent visits to Cornwall, I have been attempting to reproduce photographically Brandling’s twelve scenes as they now appear, compared with the early 1850s. Using Lightroom and Silver Efex, images have been converted to black and white and toned to match as far as possible the colouring of the original lithographs. Most of the images were taken with a Nikon D810 using 28-300mm or 18-35mm lenses.
Nikon D810; 28-300; 28 mm; 1/500 at f8 ISO 800 32
Landscape Magazine Winter 2020
