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’.
Imagining the countryside: a response to Jonathan Meades
The picturesque is a vehicle of ruthless sentiment, but the greatest English artists offer a more humane, realistic vision of landscape.
This article is copyright Peter Wood and openDemocracy.
