Constable, who lived the land more closely than many of his fellow painters, believed that his art could be found under every hedge, and therefore refused to idealise what he saw. For us, however, who cannot recapture the immediacy of human life implicit in them, Constable’s landscapes have become rural idylls, endowed with an otherworldly tranquillity.

But can a landscape ever be more than itself; that is, can a landscape, with its multiplicity of views and vast panoramas leading to still more views, ever be ideal in itself? Or is it only the artist’s image that makes it so? Painters have believed passionately in the possibility of an ideal landscape, in the discovery of some nostalgic and complementary Eden. From a working artist’s point of view, to feel at one with an ‘ideal’ is the happiest and most assured form of submission. It is also the state from which beauty seems most likely to emerge.

Once an ideal exists, however, it tends to bully every rival version either into matching up to its standard of perfection or contradicting it. And contradiction of an idea, in turn, has an air of outrageousness; occasionally misrepresented as originality and insight. This rebellious instinct for challenging ideals is yet another aspect of how we see, equally reflective of who we are.

People who do not practise painting often fail to understand that painting is a language of relationships. Human beings love relationships, all sorts of relationships. After a century of textbook psychology, most of us are in complex relationships not only with others but also with ourselves. We are in intense relationships with our settings, with our homes and, in an attempt to find consolation from nature, with landscape.

Whereas a home is a self-contained opportunity for order, the difficulty and elusive charm of our relationship with landscape is that landscape is uncontainable. It is also in a less direct relationship with us than we are with it. Of course, landscape responds to our handling of it, to good as opposed to delinquent husbandry. But, if left alone, its capacity simply to exist hungrily asserts itself. (In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, there is a wonderful passage describing a house, once lived in and loved, and later deserted, as it is reclaimed from the rampant instincts of nature.)

A vision of landscape distilled into painting, even the most powerful and persuasive perception, is still going to be a version of landscape and never the total thing itself. Kenneth Clark asks ‘Is the love of a good view ever the same thing as the love of a landscape?’

Constable believed that art must be based on one single dominating idea, an idea that will control all nuances of relationship into a single expression. The insight that results from a single dominating idea is informative, affecting and infectious. By a ruthless process of selection, it makes clear something which is hidden to lazy, uninformed vision. This, too, one learns from teaching art students: those with unfocused, prettily optimistic talents are frequently overtaken by maladroit tortoises spurred on by some consuming passion.

But, to what extent can a landscape reflect man’s relationship with himself? How did landscape painting first occur? It might have arisen from fear, translated into the exquisite walled gardens of medieval tapestry; or from the naturalistic skill to set down plainly what was seen, as in a painting by Piero della Francesca. Alternatively, landscape might have arisen from the subtly imposed grid-like organisation of a Giovanni Bellini or Nicolas Poussin, in which intellect and design are implicit and identical with emotion. Or perhaps from a more Romantic and pantheistic need to surrender to a power greater than ourselves, knowing that it is only by a form of submission in which we first lose ourselves that we will regain a greater grasp of ourselves later on. All these impulses are expressed through landscape painting, as much as through our own direct experience.

How you see is undoubtedly who you are; but how do we improve on that intelligent process of seeing, in order to see more and better? Have we reached a point of such self-engrossing complexity that the simple, enjoyable pleasures of seeing are beginning to be beyond us?

From experiencing, to controlling, nature

In his book, Bodyscape, Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that our relationship with ourselves has become increasingly less secure, bullied by technology, society, politics and media-inspired vanity. If this is so, then inevitably our relationship with landscape is fragmented, and the possibilities for landscape painting diminished.

In our own English tradition of landscape painting, we tend to think too automatically of the watercolourist traditions begun in the 17th and 18th centuries and perpetuated as a form of seemly, leisurely pursuit in the 19th century. Apart from conspicuous masters such as John Robert Cozens and John Sell Cotman, much of this tradition consists of prosaic topography.

More recently, the elements of landscape have been translated into abstractions. They are not interpreted visually and directly, but as a language of autonomous forms, bereft of detailed reference to the land and the life that it sustains.

We might each forget that the real basis of landscape painting was established by painters who were interested in relating landscape to people and people to landscape. This can make landscape painting appear to be a sideline, a mere adjunct to some other category of painting. But, in fact, man is always implicit in landscape painting, even when absent. He remains the spectator, the creature on whose emotions the spectacle of landscape painting plays.

This is why there is something so final and gloriously satisfying in the painting of Summer by Poussin, commissioned by the Duke of Richelieu, in which every complex movement in the landscape is an element of the same design, establishing the presence of man.

It has become difficult to feel breathtaking fear in the face of landscape, unless caught in extreme situations such as a storm at sea. We have lost the early Renaissance experience of gazing out from the window of a steeply walled town and feeling the territory beyond to be so bleak with hidden danger that it has no beauty for us. We have lost the capacity to experience landscape painting as a method for taming that fear, or for making the unapproachable familiar, as in the maelstrom vision of a painting by Turner.

Equally, we have lost the ability to perceive landscape as some Arcadian dream. The uncertainties we feel about life and ourselves are very rarely now encapsulated in landscape, even in the face of recent rural tragedies. As a result, landscape painting has come to register in our minds as pure pleasure, but intellectually marginal. It has degenerated into picture-making. Not so much a backdrop to some figurative tradition, as the presumed backdrop to our own self-importance.

We, ourselves, are now the figures who are centre stage in landscape, whether in reality or idealised in paint. No longer truly in awe of landscape, nor pantheistically submissive to nature, the way Lamartine’s poetry expressed it, we are far more fascinated by our own internalised landscapes. Nature is something we take for granted and we are therefore less capable of seeing it and rendering it anew on canvas; our responses are automatic and over-stylised.

From ‘how we see’ to ‘who we are’

In Western civilisation, those societies most founded in self-belief, have also been the most bourgeois, dutifully converting glamour into images of plainness, devoid of mystery. The Dutch landscape traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries illustrate this, whilst also anticipating our modern view. The paintings of Ruysdael and Cuyp represent many elements in landscape that we respond to and admire.