The notion of education of the eye has been at the heart of the development of the idea of landscape since the inception of the concept during the fifteenth century (de Bolla, 2003). Whether it has been as a genre of painting, an aesthetic and response, a social construction or as a way of seeing, landscape has been the ‘canvas’ on which many aspects of social change and understandings have been represented. Landscape production has responded to wealth, power, whim and fancy. In doing so it has privileged the view, given prominence to wealth and power, and romanticised, idealised, marginalised or excluded the people who were the very means of production of those landscapes (Barrell, 1980). In the modern era, landscapes, whether material or representational, are illustrative of social relations with land and have been at the forefront of social discourse on such themes as class, wealth and power. These have included land ownership, park and agricultural improvement and customary rights. At other times they have been relegated into the background as landscape’s moral and social narratives waned. Today, landscape, in its various forms, remains a robust and useful, albeit elastic, concept through which to investigate a range of social, economic and political relations as “it is free from fixed positions, elusive in meaning yet all embracing in scope” (Whyte, 2002:13).
Although it has been argued that the theoretical foundation for landscape was in place before the production of landscape paintings (Cosgrove, 1984), it is its visual format that has dominated, not only via popular definition but also through representation. Landscape was first defined as a technical term “for a picture representing natural inland scenery; then it was also used to mean a particular tract of land that could be seen from one point of view, as if it were a picture; and finally it came to mean the whole of natural scenery” (original emphasis, Heffernan, 1985:3). Travel, wealth and growing aesthetic appreciation or pretensions of aesthetic appreciation acted as agents
in the dissemination of landscape as a style of painting across Western Europe from Flanders and Italy to England, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Cosgrove (1984) argues that the first recognition of landscape art was by fifteenth century wealthy Italian merchants visiting Flanders, attracted by the exotic style of landscape backgrounds used for classical or religious subjects painted by Flemish artists. Not until the sixteenth century was landscape established as an autonomous subject for painting (Hussey, 1967). This nexus of travel, wealth and aesthetic appreciation, in the form of the ‘peregrination’ or the ‘Grand Tour’, brought the new landscape genre to England.
For centuries there has been a tradition of travel from England to the continent for “a wide variety of religious, diplomatic, military and mercantile reasons” (Brennan, 2004:9). However, it was from the middle of the sixteenth century that travel for educational and cultural purposes became prominent, peaking during the eighteenth century. The grand tour was seen as a finishing school for young gentlemen of wealthy aristocratic families and increasingly for gentry families. As an extended period of travel it was generally undertaken between finishing university and undertaking a career, and it exposed these gentlemen to a broad range of new innovations, including landscape paintings (Withey, 1997; Brennan, 2004). These gentlemen, along with other “wealthy and sophisticated” travellers, brought back to England large numbers of paintings, both commissioned and purchased. Some individuals returned with extensive collections, such as the Second Marquess of Annandale with more than three hundred pictures (Ingamells, 1996:27). These paintings in turn exposed local artists to new forms of representation.
The ‘ideal landscape’ of the seventeenth century was represented by continental artists such as Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Nicolas Poussin. They were particularly known for representing nature in imaginative settings, using wild or fierce aspects of nature or romantic lighting. In the eighteenth century this became the basis for interpretation of and comparison with English landscape painting and eventually applied to material landscapes (Hussey 1967; Watson, 1970; Heffernan, 1985). The work of these artists and others were popular purchases whilst on tour, due in part to their ease of purchase and export compared with the works of the great masters (Haskell, 1996). Watkins (1982) noted that the appreciation and interpretations of
local landscapes was possible only after familiarisation with the works of such seventeenth century landscape painters. Participation in the analysis of landscape required a moneyed public possessing an appropriate education, leisure time for the appreciation of art and later the participation in travel within England for the aesthetic pleasure of local natural scenery (Copley and Garside, 1994; Pfau, 1997).
Such a public could then be further educated in the methods for understanding and appreciating landscape. These methods were predicated on contemporary ideas of spectatorship and the eye being directly linked to the emotional core. Thus, the viewing of a landscape had a psychological effect (Kroeber, 1975; Cosgrove, 1985; Bermingham, 2005). The development of an aesthetic approach to landscape through distinguishable and distinctive categories of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful provided the educated English class with a means of interpretation. This offered a distinct perspective for viewing, assigning and critiquing landscape painting and natural landscapes (Withey, 1997; Conron, 2000). Continental artists defined the repertoire of images for the beautiful and the sublime until the middle of the nineteenth century. But it was the English painters, in particular, that defined the picturesque, occupying the middle ground between the beautiful and the sublime. The picturesque brought together human sensibilities, culture, art and nature, through the provocation of the eye and the mind (Conron, 2000).
The picturesque emerged as a phenomenon of taste at a time when painters were taking greater interest in the British countryside. As an aesthetic category it visualised and pictorialised nature and the countryside, as landscape. Its techniques provided an intellectual way of viewing, composing and responding to nature, “a mode for processing the physical world” from a hostile unknown to a safe pictorial representation (Hunt, 1992:4). William Gilpin, through his publications of his tours, introduced his readership to the components and nuances of the picturesque. He used particular characteristics associated with irregularity of line, colour and texture. This enabled the recognition of specific natural scenes as worthy of painting. To gain intellectual pleasure beyond the recognition of the beauty of the scene, the scene was often mentally manipulated. This drew on the observer’s classical education by evoking the artificial landscape works of both painting and literature, such as Claude’s landscapes and images from Virgil’s poetry (Ballantyne, 2002).
This approach enabled the educated observer to knowledgeably view and experience the visual sensation of the pictorial or natural landscape and provided a language for its articulation (Watson, 1970; Conron, 2000), thus giving the “practitioner” the “visual and descriptive competence” (Pfau, 1997:28) to identify, visualise and recollect appropriately (Ballantyne, 2002). Hundreds of guidebooks and sketchbooks by reputable writers, such as Gilpin, Thomas Gray and later, Wordsworth, and those lesser known, were produced to assist practitioners in the appreciation of natural landscapes. These books helped shape the development of the aesthetic by guiding people in their choices of what places to visit, what to observe, and how to appreciate what they saw (Withey, 1997; Bramen, 2002). The picturesque fulfilled the growing demand for interactions with landscapes which engaged more than visual satisfaction. Through active continuation of the notion of the ideal landscape, the picturesque maintained the former’s ‘improving’ mentality as both intellectual and technical practices (Watson, 1970).
The aesthetic consciousness and improving mentality moved the concept of the ‘ideal landscape’ from the walls of the country houses to the environment outside. Pleasure grounds and estate gardens became living ‘canvases’ on which the changing modes of taste were expressed. Central to these transformations was the particular use and deployment of trees. By the early mid eighteenth century the development of a new garden style echoed the historical landscapes paintings from the continent. The Italian influence, classical allusions and serpentine lines created strong references to Claude and Poussin. In laying out the garden, it was treated as if a painting, with the area under development divided into the painting convention of three planes: the foreground, the middle ground and the background, in which specific focal elements were concentrated. Vistas were created as views and framed with trees, some sequenced to be viewed in order to be seen to their best advantage (Williamson, 1995). Lancelot Brown, working in the second half of the eighteenth century, reversed the painting reference by producing landscapes capable of inspiring the labours of poets and painter. Brown’s speciality was the landscape park. Seeing himself as an ‘improver’ and a ‘place-maker’, Brown changed the gardening vocabulary of the time by removing classical, Arcadian and geometric associations. In partnership with nature, in its improved more perfect form, he would create a
harmonious, highly constructed, ideal ‘natural’ landscape, offering scenes worthy of a painter. These gardens were long term commitments as young trees planted took years to attain their full effect. Aesthetic enhancements to an estate were expensive and time consuming, and took up a considerable amount of land, for example, some clients were willing to lose sixty to eighty acres of fertile land to one of Brown’s lakes (Turner, 1985). In a number of cases the dedication of this amount of land to non- productive activities was only possible because of the parallel revolution in agricultural practice.
The enclosure of the open fields, commons and waste lands was one way of gaining additional land for estate enlargement, aesthetic and agricultural improvement. As noted by Williamson (1995), enclosure had been a progressive practice since the fifteenth century. The pace of enclosure accelerated during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when acts of parliament were required to enclose particular areas, making available land deemed to be necessary for agricultural expansion. Williamson (1995) also points to the role of the tree as a potent symbol of enclosed land. Thousands of trees were planted in gardens, deer, forest and landscape parks, something that was not possible in the open fields system, where trees were used for firewood or as animal fodder (Daniels, 1988). More emblematic of the practicalities of enclosure were fences, stone walls, hedges and gates which over time became ubiquitous markers in the landscape.
The progressive, ‘improver’ estate was a powerful image, as can be seen in Figure 3.1, Gainsborough’s painting Mr and Mrs Andrews (circa 1750). Modern, up-to-date agriculture methods and signs of enclosure are evident, the rows of wheat have been ploughed “in the modern manner” indicated by the straight and regular ridge and furrow pattern; sheep are ‘enclosed’ within a hedge and gate system (Vaughan, 2002:57); and trees are evident across the landscape and as a stately backdrop to Mr and Mrs Andrews themselves. Amongst Gainsborough’s work this painting remains a rare detailed example of the direct association between the landowner and agricultural improvement, something that both landowners and garden/park designers spent a great deal of time and money on to conceal from view. There is debate over how often such images were painted. Payne (1993) contends that many ‘improver’ landowners commissioned paintings of progressive agricultural undertakings,
implements, prize stock and agricultural events, while Prince (1988) argues that agricultural innovation was not a popular subject amongst artists or landowners.
Figure 3.1. Mr and Mrs Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1748-1750. © National Gallery London. Source: Asfour and Williamson (1999:50)
Not all painters of the period, including Constable, were comfortable with the impacts of the new agricultural and social changes. They drew on more traditional agricultural practices, capturing instead bucolic, harmonious scenes of productivity, imagined of the older, more traditional social relations that were disappearing. This memory was being forgotten in the face of the new agricultural improvements (Barrell, 1980); a backward gaze tinged with regret. Despite cultivated landscapes being considered vulgar and low order subject matter by the theorists of the picturesque, commercially these paintings had a considerable following, with a buoyant market found among those of popular taste (Payne, 1993).