This book offers a panoramic view of the British landscape through the eyes of writers and artists. It describes how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by each generation.
The book is arranged chronologically. The chapter I want to focus on is called 'Vision' and covers approximately 1800-1850's. To fully understand it a little context of previous attitudes is required. To most the landscape is seen as productive (farmland) or inconvenient (marshes/mountains). During the 1700's attitudes start to change. Early in the century a rare account describing the Scottish Highlands states they are "rude and offensive to the sight, things of frightful irregularity and horrid gloom. Huge naked rocks" (p.138). By 1740 the idea of paradoxical sensations whereby one felt simultaneously fascinated and appalled was 'delightful horror'. The mountains had become exciting.
By the late 1700's the new middle classes were visiting the Lake District in huge numbers and the idea of picturesque views is laid out in guidebooks to instruct tourists.
I was particularly interested by the poets and artists who thought that the experience of the landscape was important and who had particular attachments to specific places.
The poet Coleridge explored the fells from his new home at Keswick in the Lake District with a passion bordering on obsession.
"In simple earnest, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion, rises up from within me - a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no one point of the compass, & comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my while Being is filled with waves, as it were, that roll & stumble, one this way, one that way, like things that have no common master. [...] The farther I ascend from animated Nature, from men, and cattle, & the common birds of the woods, & fields, the greater becomes in me the Intensity of the feeling of Life..." (p.175).
William Cowper remained faithful to the unspectacular lanes and fields of his beloved local landscape. His poem 'The Task' celebrates experiencing the landscape with all the senses. he writes of smelling the turf, fungi and wild thyme, hearing birdsong, and his feet sinking into molehills. He knew his landscape intimately, "scenes must be beautiful" he concludes "which daily viewed, please daily and whose novelty survives, long knowledge and the scrutiny of years" (p.180).
This poem was well known by John Constable. He casually quoted it in letters. He is a painter renowned for his works being of the places he knew best, especially Suffolk. He went on a sketching tour to the lake district but the watercolours he brought back are oddly unfocussed, as though he couldn't quite grasp the lakes. Constable was the son of a mille)r so he knew how windmills worked, he was fascinated by ploughs and could tell you the week of the year by the colour of the corn in a painting. He understood his landscape and the people in it. He painted en plein air, first in sketchbooks but did complete full canvases outside. His whole career can be thought of as a struggle to redefine the landscape - to rethink it was something that embraced the local, the everyday, the industrial, the inhabited.
John Clare was similar but was a poet. He was the son of a near-illiterate agricultural labourer. He was immersed in his landscape from childhood. Where his contemporary Keats writes a poem about a nightingale and his themes are poetry, transience and death with learned allusions, Clare's poem is altogether more down to earth. He asks us to crouch in the undergrowth and marvel at the song of the drab little bird. Clare was tuned into the humble within the magnificent. He identified with his local landscape to the extent that it was him, so the Inclosure Act that allowed landowners to appropriate common land meant his favourite places all met with misfortunes; favourite trees were felled and a willow bower he had created was destroyed. It is hard not to associate his mental disorder with the desecration of his landscape.
Turner is described in the book as a visual novelist. Over the course of a decade, he made 96 watercolours for a project eventually titled Picturesque Views of England and Wales. This venture resulted in one of the most wide-ranging inventories of Britain's landscapes. Turner was allowed to choose the sites. Through the lens of landscape, he tells of industrialisation, new cities, traditional forms of rural life side by side with the urgent action of modern manufacturing. Turner was an artist who could draw on his memories via his sketchbooks and his huge visual experience to tell the story of history, tradition, progress, social life, commerce and modernity. I note that Turner was born in a city.
Had Constable been asked it is unlikely that he would have agreed to such a commission, and it is unlikely that it would have been successful. "I should paint my own places best" (p.189) he once said.
Wordsworth had reflected upon the way in which certain places enter the bloodstream and play on the mind even when one is far away. For both Wordsworth and Constable, the visual aspect of landscape was richly interleaved with potent layers of memory and association.
"And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While I stand here, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years." (p.190)
Samuel Palmer grew up in south London and often accompanied his father on long walks in their countryside. He had two great mentors with opposing views. The first, Linnel, attempted to guide him towards rigorous observation on the grounds that this would lead to saleable work. The work of his other mentor, William Blake, was shaped by a powerful inner vision that suggested a new and seductive way of seeing the world. Blake's Virgil illustrations unlocked landscape for Palmer. Just when Constable's rigorously observed mode of landscape painting seemed to be the future, Palmer reinvented it in an unapologetically archaic way using his literary imagination to suggest a mystical world charged with joy and wonder shining through the tangible, every day one. Rather than invent an imagined world he sought out unconventional subjects and times of day, often sketching during nocturnal rambles.
Millais and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists got the attention of art critic John Ruskin due to the fact they were looking at the world differently and painting 'truthful detail' - this is how nature really appears to your eyes. Ruskin urged young artists to avoid emulating others or striving for a style but instead he advised them to 'go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly'. Put simply - draw what was there. The foreground now becomes the focal point in much landscape art of the age.
Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters are authors whose work would not have been possible without the deep connection to the landscapes they were so familiar with. Emily was said to be the sister most deeply connected to the moors and in her novel Wuthering Heights characters and landscapes become mixed into each other. Emotions are also expressed in terms of landscape.
By the 1850's, for the first time, more people lived in urban than rural areas. Attitudes to the landscape changed again. Having once been part of daily life for the majority, when viewed from the town the hills, fields, heaths and marshes were no longer understood in the same practical way. Areas of uncultivated land - flat land in particular, rather than places that might be regarded at this date as picturesque - became places to fear. A horror of the countryside was born in the Victorian era - one that has never quite gone away.
The above is what I read out to summarise the chapter to my group.
(Readers should be aware this directly quotes the author throughout but is not properly referenced so it is impossible to distinguish between her words and mine. It is recorded here so that I have a record of my summary of the chapter as I presented it.)