Imagining the countryside: a response to Jonathan Meades, Peter Wood

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Meades‘s entertaining attack on the ‘picturesque’ will be endorsed by anyone at all close to the activities of the English countryside. In reading it, the phrase of a respected senior planner of the Lake District Planning Board in a 1970s report came to mind. The main activity of visitors to the Lake District, he wrote, is ‘touring the scenery by car’. The categorisation of landscape as ‘scenic’ is indeed the problem – but how far and deep does it run?

A proper answer to this question would require an essay as long as Jonathan’s own splendidly forthright argument. In a brief note, I wish only to suggest that he is right to target some attitudes behind some forms of the picturesque, but that the more general link with the art of painting is quite the wrong one.

William Gilpin, the early theorist of the picturesque, found the Wye valley and its scenery in need of improvement. He and his associates, especially John Byng, found that both dilapidated housing and poor people spoiled the appearance of the river. Byng, in a fit of what must seem to us callous inhumanity, proposed that signs of life – the ‘surrounding cottages and orchards...might be removed’ to restore Tintern Abbey as a picturesque object.

Gilpin, sounding indeed like a National Park planner of the 1970s, notes that the Tintern ironworks introduced ‘noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity’. The point, of course, is that if they really represented ‘noise and bustle’ then Tintern was only a region of tranquillity in Gilpin’s distorting perception of it. The baleful survival of such forms of thought in the present is reflected in a planning judgement rejecting a Lakeland barn conversion, which spoke of ‘unacceptable signs of human life’.

It would be a mistake, however, to see this life-denying minor tradition as a block to a true and varied perception of a living countryside. Within a few years, Gilpin’s approach received just the sort of criticism from his more intelligent contemporaries that Jonathan Meades himself would have launched had his emergence from childhood bandit country belonged to that era. The painter David Cox, for example, distinguished tellingly between the narrow, picturesque concerns that animated the Gilpinites and his own feeling for the hill country of North Wales: ‘these are the works of the mind, which I consider very far before portraits of places.’

How a painting lives

Even more tellingly, the painter Samuel Palmer – no partisan of the picturesque – said that ‘landscape is of little value, but as it hints or expresses the thoughts and doings of man.’ These words, which William Wordsworth might have endorsed, reveal the fundamental distinction between the attitudes behind the strains of painterly tradition represented by William Gilpin and Samuel Palmer.

The contrast is equally clear when we look at Constable and above all Turner, two unquestionably great artists who looked steadily at the active working countryside. In Modern Painters, John Ruskin draws out the difference between Clarkson Stanfield‘s drawing of a Breton windmill and Turner‘s Liber Studiorum study of a windmill and lock.

Describing Stanfield respectfully as the ‘first master of the lower picturesque’, Ruskin notes his exquisitely varied roof compared with Turner’s ‘plain, ugly gable – a windmill roof and nothing more’. The problem is that Stanfield’s sails do not look as if they ‘had ever been serviceable windmill sails’ while Turner’s have the ‘exact switchy sway of the sail that is always straining against the wind’.

Ruskin asks us to consider the spirit behind these pictures. Stanfield is delighted with his ruined, unserviceable mill; but Turner’s mill is a working mill and still serviceable. Both men are painters of the picturesque but Turner ‘has no joy of his mill’ and his picture reflects the melancholy human labour behind it. Ruskin notes that ‘the lower picturesque ideal is eminently a heartless one’.

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Imagining the countryside: a response to Jonathan Meades, Peter Wood