Picturing The View

Rural landscape painting became a major genre in the 1780's when, paradoxically, the real landscape was undergoing improvements which increased its productivity and efficiency. The commercial and monetary value of land was increasing and beginning to acquire new social and political value. At the same time, as noted above, nature and the natural began to assume key aesthetic and cultural values.

Gainsborough, amongst others, saw landscape as a refuge from the demands of society and its increasingly urban culture. Often his pictures (and others like them) present us with an idealized view of the countryside which had little to do with the real situation, for the distress and hardship of the rural poor is usally glossed over. After Gainsborough's death this sentimentalizing of the rural landscape became codified in an aesthetic of the 'picturesque'.

The picturesque became embedded in the perception of the English landscape; nature was studied, but it was a nature overgrown and underproductive, the opposite of the reality. It was (and is) an aesthetic based on poverty - its subject matter being typically hovels, cottages, mills, old barns, worn-out carthorses, gypsies, beggars etc. The picturesque landscape is one abandoned, celebrating a disappeared or disappearing way of life.

The effects of the picturesque tradition has been to form, in large measure, the way we see the countryside today - and the origins of the picturesque, in turn, lay in the land-owning aristocracy's experience of the newly-fashionable Grand Tour by means of which the classical tradition of learning and culture was absorbed. The Italian paintings collected en route in the first half of the eighteenth century show a Golden Age landscape, and so almost never cultivated; any figures are often the shepherds of the Arcadian Pastoral. Claude's works were especially valued for their classical associations which somehow identified their new owners as being themselves the inheritors of patrician civilisation.

Arcadian Pastoral portrays an ideal life of unchanging stability and harmony with nature. So the parkland created around the new country houses which were springing up in the eighteenth century provided a stylized form of just such a 'natural' landscape; whole villages might be destroyed or moved to improve the view from the house. (At the same time the working landscape outside the park was becoming increasingly geometrical and enclosed.) The landscape park sought to reproduce the landscape of Arcadia, not only in terms of features such as trees, lakes, hills and waterfalls but by introducing classical architectural elements, frequently in picturesque ruins. The house itself was increasingly being built in a Palladian classical style; a multitude of prospects was introduced to reproduce, as far as possible, the paintings, of Claude, Rosa and Poussin. The Claude glass was invented, by means of which the landscape could be viewed through a brownish distorting mirror so that the reflected landscape could take on the acceptably harmonious colouration of old varnish - so preferable to nature's garish greenery.