Landscape gardens, narrative painting and ‘High Summer’
'The Lascivious Squire' C1800 by Thomas Rowlandson, pencil, ink and colour washes.
The last thing
to be made after a series of pictures is completed is the lecture accounting
for it. The danger in such hindsight is the tendency
to correct false turns, erase blunders and give to the development a steadfast
and inevitable direction never discerned at the time of making. Such presentations tend, for example,
to foreground ideas and to present these as if conceived fully formed and
separated from unconscious wanderings and the graft of making images.
I
must say that increasingly I think that my pictures ‘speak for themselves’. My earlier work, that concerning twentieth
century history, required some unpacking as the public could not be expected
to have an intimate knowledge of the subject matter; whether it be early Soviet
history or the fate of the Jews of Bohemia during the Second World War.
Recounting these historical narratives offered a productive way of
speaking about my pictures. But since I have turned my attention to
contemporary Britain... I have felt lost for words.
I
intend, therefore, to write here about some of the paintings and gardens that
I was looking at whilst making High Summer, in the hope that the connections linking these disparate images
and places will best be revealed in the work itself.
For
some years now I have been studying the marvellous body of work left to us
by William Hogarth. I would like
briefly to discuss his An
Election Entertainment which
was the first in a series of four paintings Hogarth made concerning the 1754
election campaign in Oxfordshire. It
is presently housed in John Soane’s labyrinthine museum in London.
I learnt something from this picture which I have employed in my recent
work, and it concerns the use of ironic contrast.
The
scene is set in a functions room in the fictional constituency of ‘Guzzledown’.
Outside the window the Tories are parading under the same banners as
the Whigs, who now occupy the hall they have just vacated.
With no real difference between the two parties the election has degenerated
into a slanging match over trivial issues and the bawdy electorate are seen
making the most of the bribe of a free lunch. At one end of the arrangement of trestle
tables the ambitious and foppish politician Sir Commodity Taxem seems over
whelmed by his drunken supporters. In the foreground of the picture a Whig
attorney collapses as he is struck on the head by a brick thrown through the
window, and to his right the mayor is bled by an apothecary to help him recover
after a surfeit of oysters.
The
picture alludes through its form and subject to Leonardo Da Vinci’s
The Last Supper. Hogarth creates an ironic contrast between
that painting’s sense of obligation and sacrifice and the corruption
and fatuousness of the present scene. In ‘High Summer’ I too attempt an ironic contrast,
between the idealised Arcadian setting and antics of the contemporary tourists
wandering though it.
The
seed of the ‘High Summer’ series was planted twenty years ago
when I first visited Rousham Park near my hometown of Oxford. Rousham is a small landscaped garden offering vistas framed
by trees, winding paths, streams, classical statues and garden buildings which
include temples, a Palladian gateway and a variety of follies. Its importance is as a prototype where
the ideas associated with the English landscape garden were first worked out
by designers Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. They in turn were influenced by the classical landscape paintings
of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin (of whom more later). The dominant style of garden design when
Kent began working at Rousham in 1738 was still the formal geometrical garden
with its straight vistas and clipped trees. Bridgeman’s most important innovation had been the ha-ha;
a ditch surrounding the garden in place of a fence or wall, which gave the
impression of including the surrounding landscape within the garden’s
design. Kent treated the construction
of the garden as if making a series of painted views, connecting one to the
next by serpentine walkways.
I
also used two other gardens from this period, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire
and Stourhead in Hampshire, which are larger and more elaborate than Rousham. Stowe offers a particularly interesting
example of how a political statement could be encoded into a seemingly innocuous
garden design. Its owner, Viscount
Cobham, along with other radical Whigs took Republican Rome as their model.
The Palladian houses they built in fact became badges of this ideology. Cobham began his garden in 1715 when he was dismissed from
the army for his Whig beliefs and retired to his estate. He had John Vanburgh rebuild the house
and design temples for the garden whilst Charles Bridgeman laid out the grounds.
The Viscount resumed his army career but again resigned in 1733 over
Walpole’s Excise Bill. A new coalition of disaffected Whigs and
old Tories formed against Walpole who had by this time been in power for twenty
years. This group gathered around
Fredrick, Prince of Wales, and the new style of gardening was associated with
this disgruntled coalition.
At
this point William Kent arrived at Stowe and laid out his ‘Elysian Fields’
and ‘River Styx’. With
James Gibbs, who replaced Vanburgh on his death, he designed ‘The Temple
of Ancient Virtue’ containing statues of amongst others Socrates and
Homer. Near by, and in implied
contrast, stood ‘The Temple of Modern Virtue,’ which was a ruin
containing a headless figure generally taken to be that of Walpole. Further political inscriptions were made
in the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ with its busts of Whig heroes
and the ‘Temple of Friendship’ containing a statue of the Prince
of Wales and other opposition figures.
As
has already been mentioned, one of the major sources of inspiration for these
gardens were the landscapes paintings of Claude and Poussin, brought back
from Rome in quantities by English aristocrats and their agents. For the wealthy the Grand Tour formed an obligatory part of
their education. These were the
original tourists, travelling for pleasure and self-improvement rather than
for war or religion. Like modern
tourists some encounter mishaps, were robbed or fell ill, and once away from
home others indulged in promiscuous sex, gambling and gluttony. Never the
less, many also cultivated a great knowledge of, and love for, Italian painting
and their legacy is to be found in our national collections. First hand experience of European art was also considered essential
in the training of an artist and William Kent, for example, had travelled
in Italy for ten years before commencing his career as a landscape designer.
One
can still see in some of these English country houses the effect of a Claude
painting hanging beside a window which opens up onto an echoing classical
landscape by William Kent. Part
of the designer’s artistry was in adapting the grand scale of the Roman
Campagna to that of the English country estate with its meadows and rolling
hills. An interesting reversal of this scaling
down can be seen in the fine watercolour by JMW Turner The Rise of the
River Stour at Stourhead c1824. The
artist brought an epic sense of scale to the scene by trebling the height
of the hill bordering the lake and diminishing the size of the Pantheon across
the water, thereby increasing the size of the tarn. It is a most Claudian of views. Turner’s admiration for his predecessor
is also exampled by his donation of two important paintings by himself to
the nation on the condition that they should hang alongside Claude’s
landscapes, which they do to this day in the National Gallery.
So
now let us turn our attention to the ideal landscapes of Claude Lorrain and
Nicolas Poussin. Landscape had
developed as a genre firstly in Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
where a new source of patronage was to be found amongst the rising merchant
classes who purchased small paintings for their homes. Rather as if zooming
in on the landscape background to a religious painting, the genre now placed
nature centre stage. Nature was a source of pleasure and individual contemplation,
and in this sense it was seen as politically democratic. It could also be shown as potentially uncontrollable and awe-inspiring.
An
important component of these early landscapes were signs of civilisation,
without which they were considered to have no real subject matter. The industry of peasants observed working on country
estates typically provided such reassuring subjects. The genre of landscape
embraced high and low - it encompassed both sublime imitation and every day
reality. Through the skill of the artist in rendering detail, nature was given
a visible and tangible reality, but it was also assumed that behind that reality
lay the workings of God.
There
was a troubling erotic element to nature’s reproductive fecundity, which
was often expressed through the actions of satyrs and shepherds. These transgressive subjects might cause
unease and moral turbulence in the viewer but they could be legitimised by
idealisation, and the myth of Arcadia accomplished this.
The
main sources of Arcadian myth are Theocritus’s ‘Idylls”
and Virgil’s ‘Eclogues’, which situate it either in the
little known Peloponnies or distant Sicily.
The depictions of temples and other buildings in the paintings of Poussin
and Claude do not strictly accord with these accounts of Arcadia. They are
in fact based on observations made in the Roman Compagna of Ancient Roman
ruins and again testify to the important model classical civilisation continued
to offer in the 17C.
Ideal
landscapes provided a setting for the drama of human emotions and actions
whilst also showing a Utopian world evoking the dream of some longed for perfect
life. Precedence was given to the laws of pictorial composition over the strict
observation of nature. On a metaphysical
level they invited speculation on the role of God in the formation of the
natural world.
There
is one further landscape painting I would briefly like to look at, as it too
has echoes in High Summer. The Forest
Fire by Piero Di
Cosimo hangs in my local museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford. Painted around 1505, its size and shape
suggest it was a spalliera panel, whose function in a domestic context was as a backboard to
a chest or bench.
The
collection of animals depicted strikes us as rather odd and improbable. For although many are native to the countryside
around Florence - the oxen, red deer, domestic pig and even the brown bear
which at that time still roamed the forests - others are decidedly alien,
particularly the lion and lioness. There
is shown a great variety of birds, some of which look drawn from dead specimens
in the market. They include starlings,
partridges, a pigeon, a woodcock, peregrine hawks, goldfinch and a common
crane. The picture begins to
look like a catalogue of species, motivated possible by an interest in the
emerging natural sciences.
But
this does not explain the fire and the two strange hybrid figures. Theories abound; that the fire is a metaphor for love; that
taming of fire was seen as the first step towards civilisation and language;
or that it was simply a test of the painter’s virtuosity. But what of the addition of satyrs heads
to the pig and deer? It remains
a troubling and enigmatic picture with its odd mixture of natural and unnatural
elements. Pasturelands was the picture most directly influenced
by it in my ‘High Summer’ series.
I
would like to turn now to someone I felt to be a fellow traveller whilst making
this series - Dr Syntax. The
creation of Thomas Rowlandson, the good Doctor was a cultural tourist and
eccentric who first appeared in Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque
in 1812. The tale is told through a series of pictures with verses by
William Combe attached. On his
journey all manner of ills befall Syntax, he is robbed, lost, made drunk and
near drowned, all in the search for an illusive picturesque landscape. Rowlandson satirises here the Rev. William
Gilpin’s ideas, developed in the 1760’s, of picturesque beauty
which celebrated texture, roughness and ruggedness over the smooth lines of
the parklands of Capability Brown. In
Dr
Syntax pursued by a Bull we see Syntax sketching outside Oxford and Combe’s accompanying
text reads-
‘But as he ran to save his bacon,
by hat and wig he was forsaken.’
Political
satire has seemed to me an increasingly relevant means by which an artist
can deal with the post Cold War world.
And so, along side Hogarth and Rowlandson, I have been looking at James
Gillray’s work. The marvellous image, Monster Craws
at a New Coalition Feast was made in 1787 and I quote from the recent
Tate catalogue-
‘The
subject is a familiar one; the greed and miserliness of the King and Queen,
and the perpetual need for funds of Frederick, Prince of Wales. All three are seated in front of the Treasury
gate. They sit gorging themselves
on a great bowl of guineas, inscribed ‘ John Bull’s Blood’.
The print is a satire on a partial reconciliation between the Prince
and his parents after Pitt had recommended a settlement of his debts, and
the granting of additional income, including the revenue from the Duchy of
Cornwall.’
The
final historical ingredient I would like briefly to discuss are the scenes
of every day life found in Dutch Genre painting.
I must say that I think it a great achievement when I see people still
laughing in front of humorous paintings made some 300 years ago. (Humour is
maybe the most difficult of art forms.) We can still recognise the types portrayed
and understand much of the symbolism. And my favourite is the irascible Jan Steen.
As
the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young by Steen represents a popular proverb and makes a punning play on
children smoking and blowing on pipes in imitation of their elders. It was
painted c1663. The well-humoured
family group includes the characteristically wayward Steen who appears as
the father, mischievously teaching his son to smoke. Its stance is morally equivocal and therefore appealing to
modern sensibilities. The expressive
animation of the figures and the technical quality of the paintwork I find
extraordinary.
A
brief word about the term ‘genre’.
It was used historically either to describe a type, kind or category,
as in ‘the genre of landscape’, or specifically to denote representations
of everyday life in the term - ‘Genre Painting’.
In the latter sense it was often contrasted with the weightier category
of History Painting, whose subjects were drawn from religion and classical
mythology (as we have seen, for example, in Claude’s work). The two offer again a ‘high / low’ opposition.
In
The Merry Threesome c1670, Steen takes a familiar and well-worn
theme of a lustful and foolish older man being flattered and fleeced by an
attractive young woman whilst an old crone distracts him with wine. Steen gives the story a new twist by the
attention the young woman is drawing to her own activity, pointing to the
thieving hand, yet the laughing fellow knowingly goes along with the deception.
(There is no fool like an old fool).
This treatment makes the theme less moralising and more comic and theatrical.
Steen’s casting of himself as the leering musician enhances the
self-deprecating humour of the image.
I
hope in this brief account to have shown the value I place on the study of
such paintings. Contemporary
art education seldom introduces students to art much before their own era,
and so if they wish to learn from the narrative tradition in painting, they
have to become autodidacts. They
are fortunate in having great national collections and galleries in this country,
in which the student of landscape can learn as much as by travelling the land,
like poor Dr. Syntax, in search of the elusive picturesque.
John
Goto
Oxford
2001