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Approaches to landscape paintingMichael Rosenthal aa Department of the History of Art , University of Warwick ,Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

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Approaches to Landscape PaintingMichael RosenthalDepartment of the History of Art, University of Warwick

In a lecture given in the United States and published in1953, Erwin Panofsky, describing the German traditionof the history of art, noted that"I can understand from the point of view of an English gentlemanthe art historian is apt to look like a fellow who compares andanalyses the charms of his feminine acquaintances in public insteadof making love to them in private or writing up their family trees..."

He went on to remark how there was still no chair in thehistory of art at either Oxford or Cambridgeuniversities (the former lack was remedied shortlyafterwards)1. That in 1984 things are still the same atCambridge suggests that sections of the Britishacademic establishment have yet to accept the historyof art as a serious discipline. And yet, no-one readingthe publications of Panofsky himself, his teacher AbyWarburg, or more recent authors like MichaelBaxendall could doubt that the history of art demandsas much or more of its practitioners as.any of thehumanistic disciplines.What these and other scholars have taken for grantedis that the artefact is but one result of historicalprocesses with which it is intimately linked. AsFriedrich Antal, writing in The Burlington Magazine inearly 1949 put it:"The more carefully it is scrutinized, the more easily and naturallydoes the social, intellectual and artistic picture throughout a periodslowly unfold itself and the ways in which its parts are connectedbecome increasingly clarified".2

Even the phrasing displayed Antal's incapacity toconsider the work of art as standing in historicalisolation. Here he was opposing a formalist tradition,most closely associated with Heinrich Wolfflin, whichtended to understand the work as relating principallyto other works. This allowed the historian to discussimages in terms of other images, for an artist could onlyrefine the pre-existing. The process would culminatewith painting founded only on other painting, nevernature. In this view, the artist's function was merely totransmit predetermined visual data. Hence the processof image-making may have occurred in history but wasnever historical save formalistically.In 1949, Antal considered this so logically untenablethat, with some confidence, he wrote that". . . the time will naturally come when the exclusive formalists willgenerally be recognised as in the rear of art-history, as today are theantiquarians and anecdotalists".3

Yet, 24 years on, in his essay On the Social History ofArt, Timothy Clark was to observe that, finally". ..there is the old familiar question of art history. What usedid theartist make of pictorial tradition; what forms, what schemata,enabled the artist to see and to depict? It is often seen as the onlyquestion".4

And, as I hope to demonstrate, this statement couldstand today.I am attempting to suggest some idea of the degree ofopposition in art-historical approaches which I shalldescribe in greater detail with respect to thelandscapes of Thomas Gainsborough. That there isopposition between practitioners of both formalist andnon-formalist approaches may have emerged from theabove quotations which make it clear how entrenchedformalistic art history has been. In exploring thedisagreement it becomes clear that debate overmethods has been avoided which absence of realargument is one symptom of what can seem rathermore dangerous. It may sound exaggerated to suggestthat reactions to certain instances of the 'new' historyof art represent an attack on freedom of speech and

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hence on the freedom to engage in intellectual debatein contemporary Britain. But the reactions to be citedare among other evidence which suggests that thismight be so. Indeed, that very outlook which seeks topromote 'vocational' studies at the cost of thehumanities, could be charged with seeking to curbthose habits of informed enquiry and debate whichthe latter should inculcate and which are essential forthe improvement through self-criticism of any society.

The chief problem the art historian faces is the virtuallyinsurmountable one of turning the visual into theverbal. If we are to consider a landscape painting inany way historically it is wilful to ignore any leadswhich might bear on the work. These may range fromseeing to what extent, if any, the landscape paintingmay relate to some site (and being careful to ask whatthe results do or do not signify) to comparing it withother pictures to see how typical or atypical it may be ofits period. It may be useful to have biographical datafor the artist. Or the historian might read throughpages of nature poetry contemporary with the painting(although he may find that there are no usefulconnections to be made). All the time, though, it isaccepted that any historical account of a picture mustbe approximate and, therefore, that anything whichmay tighten the focus must not be ignored.

This will bring problems in its train. To compare apainted with an actual landscape can produce avariety of results. Hills might have been heightened toaccord with some aethestic fashion for example.Alternatively, as with certain of Constable's StourValley landscapes, the picture may serve as anhistorical document of the appearance of a country at aparticular time so that we can use it to describechanges in hedge boundaries or developments inhusbandry. What must remain constant is that anypainting will reflect the ideology (in the broadest senseof reaction to environment) of the artist in question.Consequently, if asking why such and such alandscape was painted, even why a particular view wasselected, it will be necessary in providing an answer tostudy such extra-pictorial matters as, for example inConstable's case, the aesthetic preferences of theclass to which he belonged.

Now, even in enquiring why an artist elected to picturesome particular scene, we must try to define whichfactors affected this preference. These will comeunder such headings as artistic training, aesthetichabits and so on but, because any painting purportingto show some actual landscape must thus relate to thathistorical 'reality', it is impossible to considerthe imageapart from its environment, for it represents anhistorical moment. It figures as one artefact for whichsociety will at any one time have found some use. AsMichael Baxendall wrote of fifteenth-century Italianpainting and which, with minor adjustments, will applyto the production of any images:

"A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of asocial relationship.On one side there was a painter who made the picture, or at leastsupervised its making. On the other side there was somebody elsewho asked him to make it and, after he had made it. reckoned onusing it in some way or other. Both parties worked withinconventions — commercial, religious, perceptual, in the widestsense social — that were different from ours and influenced theforms of what they together made".5

This is common sense. The statement developsthemes implicit in Aby Warburg's work of the 1900s andlater. By no stretch of the imagination, could it be

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Fig 1 Thomas Gainsborough Cornard Wood d 746-8. Oil on canvas 119cm x 151cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, TheNational Gallery.

Fig 2 Thomas Gainsborough Wooded Landscape C1747 Oil on canvas, 61cm x 76cm The Tate Gallery, London.

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described as exceptionable.However, when one studies landscape painting today,particularly, it seems, that of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries in Britain, this viewpoint can becondemned out of hand. This we may demonstratethrough a discussion of the work of ThomasGainsborough.John Hayes's work on Gainsborough, particularly hisinvaluable catalogues of the prints, the drawings andthe landscape paintings, has earned him a deservedlyhigh reputation. In the latter book he stated hisopposition to the non-formalist account ofGainsborough offered by John Barrell in The DarkSide of the Landscape (1980). This he described as a"deliberately provocative study, left-wing in itsapproach" and "flawed by its theoretical approach,reading meanings into Gainsborough's work neverintended by the artist".6 In a relatively short essay,Barre l l had suggested that var iat ions inGainsborough's style were connected with tensions inthe georgic and pastoral imagery he variously utilised,these tensions having a social origin precisely becauseeither kind of imagery purported to describe somereality. The essay was thought-provoking andsuggested various lines of future research. Hayes'disagreement must mean that his book ought toprovide an alternative reading. He sees

Gainsborough's landscapes as following a morepictorially autonomous development which means,therefore, that we have some grounds for a theoreticaldebate. My own sympathies are rather more withBarrell and my own ideas have developed from ananalogous analysis.

That landscapes from various phases ofGainsborough's career are very different inappearance is self-evident. Cornard Wood (fig. 1) andthe Wooded Landscape (fig. 2) seem to portrayimagery based on nature far more than later paintings(figs. 5, 7, 8) and I should like here to give a shortaccount of what these changes seem to involve. Inboth of the earlier pictures, Gainsborough took a viewthrough an oak wood across a valley plausibly like thatof the Suffolk Stour to a village, marked by its church,and as plausibly Cornard as anywhere else. The extentto which these canvases are reminiscent of certaintypes of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes hasoften been noted and it is possible to define thisrelation through Gainsborough's own pencil copy afterRuisdael's painting La Foret (fig. 3). The latter studyfigures in a woody terrain, with pools, backed by animposingly cloudy sky. Gainsborough presumablylearned his manner from such models to produce"imitations of little Dutch landskips.7 which were,however, connected with what he himself saw in the

Fig 3 Thomas Gainsborough La Foret (after Jacob von Ruisdael) late 1740s Black and white chalk on buff paper 40cm x 41cmWhitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.

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Fig 4 Thomas Gainsborough The Harvest Wagon 1767 Oil on canvas, 118cm x 141 cm The Trustees of the Barber Institute of FineArts. The University of Birmingham.

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Fig 5 Thomas Gainsborough Peasants going to Market C1768-71 Oil on canvas, 117cm x 143cm The Greater London Council asTrustees of the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood.

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country around Sudbury where he lived until 1752. Sowhile the reminiscence of Ruisdael is undeniable inCornard Wood, this is probably because Ruisdael'sexample had alerted Gainsborough to the pictorialpotential of familiar landscapes. He could see a'Ruisdael' in nature and used a manner partly learnedfrom Ruisdael to convey the appearances of actualoaks, grasses or weeds. And the staffage, figureswhich work, dally or wander towards the village, seemto fit naturally in their painted environment. Theirrelation with landscape is virtually symbiotic. It

supports them; they husband it. The distant villagesignifies the focus of their corporate activity. We seemto find a pictorial reflection of contemporary georgicpoetry8 where, although it is necessary to labour toenjoy the fruits of the earth, that labour is notunremitting and is attended with those advantageswhich accrue from the materially prosperous societythat depends for its stability precisely on thewillingness of all to lend their various talents, frommuscle-power to intellect, for the corporate good.Such an interpretation would have come naturally to

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- A."

Fig 6 Francis Wheatley The Harvest Wagon 1774 Oil on canvas. 124cm x 99cm The Castle Museum. Nottingham.

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Fig 7 Thomas Gainsborough Rocky Wooded Landscape with Rustic Lovers, Herdsman and Cows 1773-4 Oil on canvas, 117cm x144cm Reproduced by courtesy of Viscount Camrose, Hackwood Park, Basingstoke.

the rural bourgeoisie of which the Gainsboroughswere members.In comparison with these earlier works, two later ones.The Harvest Wagon of 1767 (fig 4) and Peasants goingto Market of d 768-71 (fig 5), display dramatic changesin conception. In both, the terrain is an invention out ofthe components of the landscape of Cornard Wood.The trees, for all their beauty of effect, are hardlyspecifically recognisable. In comparison with earlierlandscapes, these places are now creations, fictionscreated by Gainsborough over evenings in Batti,although their inhabitants seem still to be real enough.Although their exquisite formal beauty can seduce thespectator into seeing either painting as portrayingsome species of pastoral idyll, a close inspection mayexplode that impression.

The Harvest Wagon has disquieting features which, ifFrancis Wheatley's pastiche (fig. 6) is any guide, werenoted at the time. The contrast between the boorishlabourers and too fine women is ironed out. Thesuperhuman figure holding the horse is omitted. Thelandscape is located — the track leads to a distant town— and a narrative element introduced through thestanding figure. Vegetation is specificallyrecognisable. These 'corrections' point to theproblems of the Gainsborough: the unreality of thelandscape, the illogical relations of figures.

Equally, the Kenwood landscape (fig. 5) has itstroubling aspects. There is a tranquil beauty to a scenewhere two unconnected groups of figures coexist. Bythe cottage are sitting figures, in the main mothers withchildren, slumped against the wall in the sun, with awoman, bearing sticks, entering it. The figures on pack

horses are weary and ragged. The foremost groupcarries produce, turnips, carrots and cabbages. If, asseems most likely, this is an evening scene and we seea return from market, it indicates that these peoplegrow too little to subsist. The walking pair is important.The red-haired child is pointing out to the elder girl,who chooses to ignore him, two females, seated by theedge of the track, and virtually indistinguishable fromtheir gloom. The younger is bowed and holds a cup.They would be asking charity which is harshly refusedthem. Here, in comparison with Cornard Wood (fig. 1),there is a strong sense of alienation between thesegroups of figures, a sense of estrangement opposed toharmonious coexistence.

The denial of charity by one group of poor to another,although the former has the material means to relievethe two women, is curious in Gainsborough. HisLondon training, at Hogarth's St. Martin's LaneAcademy, would have acquainted him withconventions of charity9, and he was himself peculiarlysensitive to the needs of others10. Hence, with thislandscape in particular it would be wrong to ignore theimagery of migration (paralleled in contemporarypaintings and drawings1'), the lack of relationshipsbetween the groups of figures and, most of all, thedenial of charity. These figures are reminders of aharsh reality in a beautiful but unreal world whilst theimagery of travelling, of dislocation, is strikinglyreminiscent of Goldsmith's in The Deserted Village.The poem, published in 1770, was partially a responseto the removal of Nuneham Courtenay village as the2nd Earl Harcourt had Brown landscapethe grounds12,something Goldsmith interpreted as an act ofdespotism by a bad landlord. Whilst it would be wrong

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Fig 8 Thomas Gainsborough The Cottage Door c1778 Oil on canvas, 120cm x 146cm Cincinnati Art Museum, given in honour of Mr.and Mrs. Charles F. Williams by their children.

to claim a dependence of painter on poet, it seems notunreasonable to suspect a parallel response to theactions of the rich and newly rich. IndeedGainsborough had an ambivalent relation with hissitters. He affected an independence of them and theRoyal Academy and, as Jack Lindsay has pointed out,seems to have become, as part of his response, aprototypical Bohemian13.Goldsmith's poem, which gained immediatepopularity, was to do with the destruction of old valuesand consequently a traditional way of life through theirresponsible use of riches. In contrasting the village.Auburn, as it had been and now was, the indictmentwas grave:. . . times are altered; trade's unfeeling trainUsurp the land and dispossess the swain;14

And consequently the villagers, the poor, migrate:Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,I see the rural virtues leave the land.'5

The poor denying the poor in Gainsborough'slandscapes could symbolise that couplet. As Crabbe'slater poem, The Village, makes clear16, Goldsmithseemed dangerously radical to some in his contentionthat the poor need /lot be subservient, that thecountryside might support its inhabitants withoutunremitting toil17, as in'deed Cornard Wood had oncesupported its.It could be then, that Gainsborough, in the way that hisimagery had a brutalising aspect, was responding tocontemporary developments in the countryside in acomparable way. Auburn and Cornard Wood hadrepresented places where, within living memory, allhad enjoyed and benefitted from what the landscape

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had materially to offer. The country in Gainsborough'swork of the late 1760s becomes exquisitely beautiful —surely an appropriate location of amenity and repose— and yet the contrast between these qualities andthose shown by the peasantry which is so constantlyand exhaustedly on the move, is sharp beyond anyirony which the juxtaposition may suggest.Gainsborough's landscapes seem to have becomeunreal idylls in which the population must be blind toits environment and keep travelling. Auburn, an idyllonce, loses those who had so freely enjoyed what it hadto offer.

Through these later years Gainsborough's landscapescontinue to beg questions. In his 1766 WoodedLandscape with Country Wagon, Milkmaid andDrover™, the latter has stopped his cart on a densely-wooded track to chat with a milkmaid who gazes shylytowards the ground. There is a sense in which thesefigures have been extracted from an environment suchas was enjoyed by their forerunners in earlier paintingsbut are at home in their world. As we have seen, thisrepose was soon to vanish. Yet, there is a class ofpainting in which it seems that it is maintained, both ofthe painter and his staffage, exemplified by the RockyLandscape, Herdsman and Cattle (fig. 7) of 1773-4. AsJohn Hayes has pointed out'9, there are here deliberateand conspicuous compositional and colouristicreferences to the landscapes of Claude which werecontemporarily considered to have realised scenesfrom that fictive Golden Age beloved of the Latinpoets'0. The pictorial reference suggests that only insuch Claudean settings could Gainsborough envisagerepose. And even with this example thefictiveelementis emphasised through other means. In Bath and

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London, Gainsborough is well known to have framedmodels for his landscapes from shreds of mirror whichbecame water, bits of broccoli for trees and lumps ofcoal or cork for rocks, lit by candles from behind. Hereone can identify the rocks amongst which the loversrest as being painted from coals. WhateverGainsborough's landscape is in his later years, it ishardly the result of a straightforward or simple reactionto the world with which, through the verisimilitude ofthe figures, it nevertheless bears some relation.The Cottage Door (fig. 8) of 1778 presents us with ableak country, lit by a declining sun shafting yellowthrough grey cloud. The cottage itself could hardlycontain the figures it seems that it does. Yet they areclean and well fed, in contrast to the stooped, virtually

featureless faggot-gatherer with his bill-hook, on thedark side of the landscape. Although we assume somerelationship between him and the women and children,this is not unambiguous. Neither is that between thetravellers and the woodman in the later Market Cart(fig. 9) where the bundle of faggots creates a barrierbetween track and forest.

The infants who pour from the cottage door arereminiscent of William Mason's in The English Garden(1775):

Want, alas!Has o'er their little limbs her livery hung.In many a tatter'd fold, yet still those limbsAre shapely..."

Fig 9 Thomas Gainsborough The Market Cart 1768 Oil on canvas, 180cm x 149cm The Tate Gallery, London.

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Fig 10 Thomas Gainsborough Wooded Landscape d 744-8 Oil on canvas, 29cm x 34cm The Hove Museum of Art.

which poem accepts that work is unavoidable even inthat perfectly constituted society which is eighteenth-century Britain. Yet, the presence of the woodman ineither composition, suggests that Gainsborough'sview might have been less complacent, forGisborne'sWalks in a Forest (1794) makes a sharp contrastbetween precisely similar figures:All hail, free foresters! I hail you free.Though at the call of Man, viceregent LordOf earth, your heads in homage bow.

. . . Think on thoseYour kindred, whom the tasteless tyrant shapesAt his own will, and dooms their living stemsTo service more degrading than his pileOf roots and refuse brushwood knows."The woodman is a free member of the proletariat,independent of any master. Hence if that woodmanbelongs to that cottage then, in the bleak landscape,we have one remaining place where the poor cancontinue to enjoy that liberty so inconspicuously theirsin Cornard Wood. But, in The Market Cart, the womenand weary children move on with their produce,separate from the forester who, like one of RobinHood's outlaws, occupies his own, unowned terrain.The above is an interpretation of how formaldevelopments in Gainsborough's landscapes mayhave been in partial response to historical changes inthe social and economic management of thecountryside from which those paintings to anincreasingly lesser extent adapt their forms. Insupposing that this may be the best way of describing

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these developments, one might expect the support ofJohn Barrell but not of John Hayes who objects to thiskind of approach as "deliberately provocative" and"left-wing", one which is, moreover, "imposed" on thepaintings. Consequently we must imagine that Haye'sown, very impressive two volume The LandscapePaintings of Thomas Gainsborough constitutes analternative view.

The text and catalogue must be praised for severalreasons. Hayes gives a very succint description ofGainsborough's stylistic development and, overall,provides an acute and detailed account of where his artstands in the context of other art. However, there arecriticisms which can be levelled at the narrative. Hayesagrees that figures in landscapes can qualify thoselandscapes but only in the most general sense so that"the labours of the countryman, and the concept of asturdy, independent peasantry were all invested with aheightened sentiment — indeed a sense of moral virtue. . . The main protagonists of this new mood, which,consciously or unconsciously, seems deeply to haveaffected the work of Gainsborough.. .were, in poetry,Oliver Goldsmith and William CowperV3 But thenovels of Fielding and the researches of recenthistorians" suggest that so sanguine a view of theeighteenth century may not be strictly justified. It isalso true that Goldsmith's and Cowper's poetry are notso ideologically comparable and that the passagequoted above infers a selective reading of TheDeserted Village.However, linking Gainsborough's paintings to poetry

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in this general way means that the figures can bedischarged of all but the most rudimentary meaning, tofunction as essentially sentimental pastoral cyphers.This argument is conducted in various ways and, withrespect to earlier landscapes, is pursued through anattempt to define Gainsborough's landscapes ofd748-59 as "rococo1. "The rococo", we read, "mayhave been a sophisticated style but it was devoid of anyintellectual organisation, complex layers of meaning,or seriousness of intent"." It therefore follows that, asGainsborough's art was rococo, it was concerned onlywith an appeal to the eye. We can safely insulate thelandscapes from contemporary attitudes which maycharge the figures with imparting meaning, values, tothe country in which they are painted. The problemswith such stylistic categorisation are twofold. First, itproduces an increasingly sophisticated ordering ofpaintings to preconceived formal criteria; and secondit forces an increasingly narrowed view of thediscipline of the historian and the function of thehistory of art.Yet, commonsense tells us that very few can be totallyunaware of, and therefore unaffected in any way, bytheir surroundings. To take note of this is not toimpose an iconography on an artist but to accept that,in approaching the pictorial historically, we mustaccept the possibility that motifs can be more thanjuxtapositions of lines or colours and be morespecifically understood if they are checked againstvarious other kinds of evidence. It is unreasonable towrite that"Gainsborough's figures rarely convey a specific message, expressspecific emotions . . . it is always something more intangible, morestrictly visual, the aura of a whole picture, that counts in affectingthe spectator"2*without offering evidence and relying on a convincedtone of prose to make the case. Furthermore, whetheror not a painting 'affects' the spectator is a privatematter; critics can block ourviewof theimage. Indeed,to argue that Gainsborough's landscapes reflect otherthan formal concerns, is not automatically to claim thatthey 'convey a specific message'. It merely suggeststhat, implied in what an artist selects to include in apicture, is information relative to something of thatartist's relation to her or his environment.At times, this refusal to allow Gainsborough'spaintings anything beyond superficial content leadsDr. Hayes to miss the significance of what is there. Thetheme of charity in the Kenwood landscape (fig. 5) wasdiscussed above. This is his account of the samepicture."These figures, some of them worn in appearance but nonethelessserene and often noble in demeanour truly act as "poetic expositors'.. . perfectly placed symbols of Gainsborough's pastoral intentions.The weary couple dropping by the roadside in the Kenwoodlandscape, the haggard old crone an archetype of the abject poor,serve as a foil to such independent beings".27

By failing to look closely enough it seems that thesubject can be adapted to a viewpoint which maintainsthat content has to be inserted rather than determinedby a number of factors which include the consciousdecisions of the artist.John Hayes, then, approaches Gainsborough with alimited brief and, although his book is excellent on itsown terms and excellent in showing howGainsborough's landscapes developed, it is not muchconcerned with why they did so. The principal thing iswhether or not the pictures affect the spectator.Gainsborough is presented as "an intuitive genius, notan intellectual"28, an individual aloof from society,whose works provide an enduring respite from thetravails of reality; and the job of the art historian is todeploy expert ise, ch ie f ly in the form ofconnoisseurship developed from looking at otherpictures, either to write catalogues, or 'prose poems' asa substitute for history. There is a tendency with this

attitude chiefly to consider Gainsborough's paintingsin terms of other paintings. Hence, in the Catalogueentry to the small study in Hove (fig. 10) we read firstthat it is unfinished and then that"The somewhat stiff tree on the left is Gaspardesque. and thecarefully placed logs are a compositional device, derived fromRuisdael . . . The compositional systems are, however, whollyrococo"29

denies the image any source in the Suffolk countrysidethat it looks to represent and from whichGainsborough is documented as having drawn andpainted30. If such paintings can be accepted as havingsome relation to the geographical realities of thelandscape, then we might gain a greater historical ideaof the relation between them and more finished oneslike the Wooded Landscape (fig. 2).To Hayes, the latter painting is a confection, theingredients of which can be isolated in seventeenth-century painting. The fields, track and wood arederived from Ruisdael, the central feature comes froma Waterloo etching whilst the figure is taken fromGaspard3'. This forgets that the painting couldrepresent an actual scene, mediated through theiragency, and which more interestingly shows the way inwhich Gainsborough would work up his studies. Theimage does relatetotheappearanceoftheStourValleyand there could be a degree of deliberate naturalism,with the fields painted in such tonal contrast to imitatethe visual shock of coming into daylight from the shadeof woods32.To relate pictures only to other pictures, to prosecute aformalistic history of art, is extremely limited.Similarity can betoken no connection save similarity,and lesser historians than John Hayes may be temptedto show off their connoisseurship at the cost of theartist. -Certainly we must have as wide as possible arange of comparative visual reference: but this meanslooking out of the window, as well as at pictures. NowHayes is offering an alternative to what he calls 'left-wing' history of art, and in the process does one or twodisturbing things. One is that he does not counter thearguments to which he objects by showing them tomisinterpret evidence, he simply states that they arewrong. Another is to condemn non-formalist writingas, by definition, having been written from a leftistpolitical stance. This is a potentially sinister limitingof the boundaries of discourse.I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Hayes intendsthis. But this certainly was the case in late 1982 whenDavid Solkin's Catalogue to his Wilson show at theTate, upset numerous critics, some of whom madeoutlandish proposals in response. Although adefinitive account of the furore has appeared in HistoryWorkshop Journal33, many of us should feel deeplyashamed for having remained silent at the time.Solkin's book sought to investigate matters similar tothose I find interesting with respect to Gainsborough.As with most pioneering works, its arguments wereconducted with varying success, being sometimesbrilliant, occasionally tendentious. But altogether itwas one of the more original texts on eighteenth-century landscapes to have been so far published. In afew quarters the reaction was based on interpretationsof evidence; in many others, it was not.One such response (to which I shall return) was inApollo. To introduce it here is appropriate, for itpurported to provide an alternative to what wasdismissed as 'Marxist' history. Thus, we read ofpaintings Wilson did in Rome in the 1750s as having"owed much to Claude, Gaspard Dughet, SalvatorRosa, Van Bloeman, Marco Ricci and Vernet"35, that is,to other paintings, never to observations of nature.This formalistic history parallels, with painful crudity.Haye's approach to Gainsborough. In the event it boilsdown to a mere catalogue of names which hardlypresents a viable substitute for Solkin's analysis of

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Wilson's art. Some of the other reviews and remarksmade at the time are as inspiring as Apollo's and yet,paradoxically, demonstrate how the history of art canbe an exercise of fundamental importance in theexercise of that fundamental liberty of the individualwhich is to be critical of, and desirous of improving theconditions of, spiritual as well as material existence.In The Sunday Times Marina Vaizey was happy to beobjective and understood what Solkin had attemptedas" . . . a lively demonstration of the new wave in art history whichemphasises the social, economic and political milieu. We arepersuaded not only to look at the paintings but to consider them intheir role as embodying a complex web of ideas. Wilson's paintingsare an important part of the intricate mechanism by which Englisharistocracy appropriated ideas about a classical past, which neverexisted in reality, in order to reinforce the ways in which they heldand wielded power".36

Quite so: but, astonishingly this was one of the raresensible responses. It is initially surprising that TheGuardian, that bastion of liberal values, should havecarried a less than enthusiastic review by WaldemarJanuszczak:"If we are to find room in our 20th century hearts for RichardWilson's paintings it is because they speak to us across the divide,because they can still lure us into their traps, because the illusion ofmeaning is the greatest of all art's illusions. Far better to understandWilson's real impact on today's spectators than to speculate andapproximate, make assumptions and jump to conclusions, confusehalf-truths with truths and take educated guesses about Wilson'simpact on his contemporaries".57

Apart from the grotesque unfairness in denigrating atext which was 'scholarly' precisely in the sense that itattempted to muster arguements from evidence, andwas very far from being the morass of misguided guesswork which Januszscak infers, the critic was defeatinghis own purpose. If art does "speak to us across thedivide", critics are obsolete. Perhaps what is mostinteresting is how an historical account of paintingscan disturb the twentieth-century preconceptions of asupposedly liberal critic. Contrast this with whatTerence Mullaly, to his very great credit, wrote in TheDaily Telegraph which would never pretend toliberalism.

"Prof. Solkin's introduction to the catalogue of the Wilsonexhibition must be considered. It is a formidable work ofscholarship and those who have been upset by it would do well toremember this. What Prof. Solkin has done is to examine Wilson'swork in the context of his times. The point is that his interpretationof the 18th century is certainly controversial. Many have indeedseen in it a Marxist bias. Many art historians and archaeologistswho are today revered have had their interpretations of particularperiods conditioned by theoretical considerations. It is enough tomention Prof. Gordon Childe . . .What should also be emphasised is that controversy over theinterpretation of history is as salutory as it is inevitable".3"In terms of the principles at stake, of which more in amoment, this is absolutely right. History is a matter ofinformed guess-work. We never can be certain of thetruth. Toleration of dissenting views is, therefore,essential, for they may teach lessons. Toleration wasone thing the writer of the third leader in The DailyTelegraph of 8th November 1982 could not allow.. Hisopening paragraph read:"The idea of 18th Century England as a golden age of liberty andsocial calm is a notion bequeathed to us by that age itself. It has longbeen offensive, however, to Marxists. Most people are familiar withthe beaverings of Tawney, the Hammonds and Hobsbawm to provethat the Industrial Revolution was an age of squalor for the urbanpoor; fewer, perhaps, with the work of E. P. Thompson on theearlier 18th Century, to show that seething local discontent amongthe rural poor was repressed only by savage penal legislation.Almost no-one, however, will be aware that the Left is now into 18thcentury art history — or that an especially shoddy example ofpoliticised distortion issued even from the Tate Gallery last week".So profoundly unintelligent is this, that one mustentertain the possibility that it is meant as an elaboratejoke. Of course the eighteenth century bequeathed usa flattering self-image: it was the ruling class which

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created that image. And it is worth remindingourselves that those long-dead historians, Tawney andthe Hammonds, based their conclusions onquantitative evidence. Thompson's Whigs andHunters makes it clear that the 'Black Act'dramaticallyincreased the numbers of rural crimes punishable bydeath. To point out that such was the state of affairs isnot to take sides: something the Leader Writer isunable to grasp. Nevertheless, while it is convenient todismiss this writing as irrelevant, it has moredangerous aspects. Rather than counter Solkin'sarguments by proving the eighteenth century to havebeen in fact a Golden Age returned, the catalogue isdismissed on political grounds. If I do not like it, it iswrong. It is not very far from this to the advocacy ofpolitical censorship over art-historian scholarship,which, indeed was the remedy recommended in aleader in Apollo:

"We would hardly claim that the amiable if indulgent Director of theTate Gallery and his squad of curators and their colleagues inCardiff and Newhaven (sic.) are in the aggregate beavering away forthe triumph of the Marxist interpretation of British Art. On theother hand, those concerned may now wonder.. .1982 was an accident-prone year for some major British galleriesand museums. As a result chairmen and trustees must be concernedto know what to do for the best now that it is more or less clear thatsome of our modern apparatchiks though keen on the sweets ofoffice, lack the administrative skill and objectivity usually expectedof the public servant. If some measure of self-policing (or self-discipline) is not instituted their ostensible masters may be obligedto take a more active part in the management of those institutionswhich, nominally at any rate, are in their charge".3*

This advocates ideological control over the actions ofmuseum curators; political censorship of such writingas the catalogues of exhibitions mounted by suchinstitutions as the Tate Gallery.Such writing may not be dangerous. Sutton's practiceof highly formalistic history of art puts him in a milieufor whom expertise in connoisseurship is deployed inthe appraisal of pictures as counters in trade, andhistorical competence is of little moment. However, inany 'free' society, to advocate this kind of control overmuseum curators is but a step in a process which willend with burning books.

It may seem melodramatic to interpret events in theseterms. But the lack of debate over conflicting arthistoriography is worrying. Not only do somehistorians dismiss without argument ideas of whichthey do not approve but they also brand the authors ofthose ideas as 'left-wing' though the latter may simplybe practising historical techniques pioneered byWarbu rg. It may be that the latter part of this essay seestoo great a conflagration on the evidence of too littlesmoke. If this is the case, nothing is lost.

Notes and References1 Panofsky, E. (1970) Three decades of art history in the United

States Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) London, p. 371.2 Antal, F. (1976) Remarks on the method of art history (1949)

Classicism and Romanticism London, p. 180.3 Ibid p. 1884 Clark, T. J. (1973) Image of the People London, p. 155 Baxendall, M. (1974) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-

Century Italy Oxford, p. 16 Hayes, J. (1982) The Landscape Paintings ol Thomas

Gainsborough 2 vols. London 1982, 1 p. 3067 Woodall, M. (ed.) (1963) The Letters ol Thomas Gainsborough

Bradford & London, p. 918 For a fuller description of this see Barrell, J. (1980) The Dark Side

of the Landscape Cambridge, pp. 35-889 Hogarth himself painted The Pool ol Bethesda and The Good

Samaritan for St Bartholomew's Hospital. Gainsborough'steachers Hayman and Gravelot were much engaged in bookillustration for works such as Richardson's in which the mutualsocial obligations of the various classes were stressed. Theassociation of this group, moreover, with Fielding who wasoccupied with comparable moral themes in his novels plus aswell Gainsborough's own low-church background combine tomake this group even more significant. An incident, notdissimilar, occurs in Morning (publ. March 1738) from Hogarth'sseries The Four Times of Day.

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10 Recorded instances of Gainsborough's own generosity andsensibility of nature abound. For examples see Whitley, W. T.(1915) Thomas Gainsborough London, pp. 41, 243, 285, 301 and367; Fulcher, G. (1856) The Life of Thomas Gainsborough R.A.London, p. 48; Woodall op. cit. pp. 39 and 59.

11 For example. The Harvest Wagon: a Wooded Landscape with...Peasants returning from Market c. 1767-8 Toledo. Ohio. ToledoMuseum of Art: Wooded Landscape with Drover c. 1771-2Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati: Mounted Peasants going toMarket c. 1773. Royal Holloway College, Egham. For drawings,see Hayes, J. (1970) The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough 2vols. London, Catalogue Nos. 283. 666 and 826.

12 See Batey, M. (1974) Oliver Goldsmith: an indictment oflandscape gardening in P. Willis (ed.) Furor HortensisEdinburgh.

13 For Gainsborough and sitters see Fulcher op. cit. pp. 62 and 102:and Gentlemen, see Woodall op. cit. pp. 99-103. See also J.Lindsay Thomas Gainsborough: his Life and Art London, 1981pp. 57, 134, 165 and 171.

14 Goldsmith, O (1770) The Deserted Village London, p. 415 Ibid p. 2216 The Village was published in 1783. For its criticism of Goldsmith

see Barrell op. cit. pp. 73-8217 Barrell loc. cit.18 Hayes Landscape Paintings Cat. No. 8719 Ibid Cat. No. 11320 See Rosenthal, M. (1983) Constable: the Painter and his

Landscape New Haven and London, p. 51 ff; Howard, D. (1969)Some eighteenth-century followers of Claude BurlingtonMagazine CLXI 801 (Dec. 1969) pp. 726-33; and Barrell, J. (1972)

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place Cambridge, pp. 1-27.

21 Quoted in J. Barrell, J. Bull (eds.) The Penguin Book of PastoralVerse London, 1974, p. 359.

22 Gisborne, T. (1797) Walks in a Forest 3rd ed., London, p. 2423 Hayes op. cit. I. pp. 8-924 See Thompson, E. P. (1975) Whigs and Hunters London: Hay, D.

et al. (1975) Albion's Fatal Tree London25 Hayes op. cit. I. p. 5426 Ibid p. 9727 Ibid pp. 115-628 Ibid p. ix29 Ibid II Cat. No. 330 Thicknesse, P. (1788) A Sketch ot the Lite and Paintings of

Thomas Gainsborough Esq. London, p. 5 and pp. 10-11; Fulcherop. cit. pp. 10. 22-5, 31-3 and 39; Beckett, R. B. (ed.) (1964) JohnConstable's Correspondence II Ipswich, pp. 11-12

31 Hayes op. cit. II, Cat. No. 1932 I am indebted to Kay Sutton for this observation33 Potts, A. and McWilliam, N. The landscape of reaction: Richard

Wilson (1713?-1782) and his Critics History Workshop Journal16, Autumn 1983, pp. 171-5

34 See M. Andrews in Garden History35 Sutton, O. (1983) A meditative love of Nature: the Richard Wilson

Exhibition Apollo CXVII 251, New ser., Jan. 1983, p. 3936 M. Vaizey Sunday Times 7 Nov. 198237 Guardian 10 Nov. 198238 T. Mullaly, Daily Telegraph 13 Nov. 198239 Sutton, editorial, op. cit., p. 3

James Durden Summer in Cumberland City ot ManchesterArt Galleries

It is not, if you are quick, too late to visit the splendidexhibition on the Lake District at the Victoria andAlbert Museum. The exhibition which is supported bythe Countryside Commission charts the public life of aplace of some importance for the myths and ideals bywhich the British have lived for the last two and a halfcenturies.The story starts with the 18th century landowners whosaw in their surroundings images of the well-wateredand wooded valleys of classical Arcadia and beganimproving the Cumbrian hills with timber plantations.It moves to the early tourists who, aided by ThomasWest's guidebook, saw the landscape as a series ofpictures from recommended viewpoints. Paintersdeveloped the classic imagery and the exhibition hasbrought together works by the established artists of theday, Farington, Hearne, Loutherbourg and Gains-borough and by the rising generation, Francis Towne,J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and many others.According to Wordsworth, the artists, perched onevery rock around the standard viewpoints, becamepart of the landscape.

Wordsworth, as the great central figure in the culture ofthe Lake District has a central place in the exhibitionwhich shows him as guide, gardener, builderandsage.From Wordsworth at Grasmere to Ruskin at Coniston,the exhibition moves to physical developments atWindermere. The residents who built villas anddeveloped hotels on the fell sides resisted the comingof the railway. So too did Wordsworth and Ruskinthough it was they more than anyone since West whobrought people to the Lakes. The painting and writingcontinue to the present day along with an increasingnumber of tourists escaping from the cities, in searchof rest and recreation, exercise and adventure. But thepresent century's impositions, the water schemes,afforestation, road improvements and mineralextraction, fail to fit the nurtured image and it is they,and the bodies that now deal with such moderndevelopments, that complete the tale.It is all, says John Murdoch in the exhibition catalogue,about the landscape of art and consciousness; andabout the idea of authority in the aesthetics -oflandscape, the Trusts and Commissions of today beingconnected through Wordsworth and Ruskin to Gilpinand Gray. The Lake District is viewed as a work ofhuman art. The exhibition, says Murdoch, is aboutNature as a construct of the human mind.It is well worth taking your human mind to see it.

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