Landscape Then and Now

The aesthetics of landscape have always been finely calibrated in response to prevailing ideological concerns of the day. When eighteenth-century grand tourists embraced the Claudean picturesque—by purchasing old master paintings in Italy, commissioning estate views from Richard Wilson, or sweeping away an English village to accommodate a new ornamental lake for the landscape garden—they engaged with a Whig politics that offered an imagery of stasis and permanence in a world marked by conflict and change. In a fast-secularizing age, Ruskin and the Victorians scanned the botanical minutiae of flora, the geology of mountains, and the meteorology of the skies in pursuit of religious meaning, eventually discovering only the “storm cloud of the nineteenth century”, a “dense manufacturing mist” that provided an allegory of environmental despoliation and moral collapse.¹

Art history, too, stands within rather than above prevailing ideologies. Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art, published in 1949, breathed a pessimism tinged with patrician regret at the loss of an idyll, destroyed by “all the science and bureaucracy in the world, all the bombs and concentration camps.” A further menace was populism. “Almost every Englishman,” Clark declares, “if asked what he meant by beauty, would begin to describe a landscape.” A combination of this “passive consent of uninformed opinion,” the “extremely specialized and esoteric work” of contemporary artists, and the “new religion” of science left landscape art, essentially, dead, with Clark as the sole mourner at its funeral.² A sense of melancholy also attaches to studies of landscape painting, bolstered by Paul Mellon’s patronage, during the 1950s and 1960s. Ellis Waterhouse, writing in 1953, found in Gainsborough’s The Harvest Wagon (ca. 1767) “one of the supreme masterpieces of British painting”, notable for “musical rhythm, kept exquisitely under control”. The “single figures, both of people and horses, combine a genial naturalness and a perfection of grace”, characteristics implicitly lacking in austerity Britain of the early 1950s, and also from the contemporary art of the period (Fig. 1).³ In the same historical moment, but from a different political position, Francis Donald Klingender offered a contrasting socialist vision of landscape imagery from the dawn of modernity, presciently drawing, within the purview of art history, on a broad range of print culture in Art and the Industrial Revolution.⁴

The study of landscape painting, and more broadly of the landscape itself, experienced a radical renewal towards the end of the Cold War, in the years following the intellectual convulsions of 1968 and the social and economic upheavals of the 1970s. A new historiography was inaugurated by key works such as John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape, Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology and the essays in The Iconography of Landscape, edited by Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove.⁵ Foundational documents of the social history of art, these methodologically eclectic works were broadly Marxian, drawing, respectively, on literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, and human geography. Together, they constituted a breakthrough in the analysis of landscape imagery. The sense of a rising historiographical tide was confirmed by the appearance of authoritative monographic accounts of Richard Wilson by David Solkin and Constable by Michael Rosenthal, a plethora of works on Turner, and Andrew Hemingway’s exhaustive study of the Norwich School.⁶ These interventions were formative for future studies, but their focus, as in classic works of social history such as E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, was resolutely national; indeed, national identity—the Englishness of English art—was a significant subtext of a body of work implicitly challenging the monopoly position hitherto held by scholars of French nineteenth-century painting.⁷

In the Thatcher era of the 1980s, a turn towards the history of consumption, rooted in the work of J.H. Plumb, John Brewer, and Neil McKendrick, shifted interest away from questions of labour and land as a site of production and social experience, but generated a richer understanding of the display, sale, and distribution of landscape paintings as objects in a market, the role of institutions, and new forms of art writing and criticism. ⁸ The magisterial exhibition Art on the Line, curated by David Solkin, placed landscape at the centre of the spectacle of the art market—“Landscape-o-rama” in Ann Bermingham’s term.⁹ Another exhibition project based on extensive research, Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door, curated by Bermingham, drew together fine art and new popular media, such as de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, which was an attempt to present a landscape scenario in animated, mechanical display.¹⁰ Related research projects have explored the history of the panorama, invented in Scotland in 1787, but soon adopted as a global technology.¹¹

But what of landscape now? Since the 1990s, the inescapable context of neoliberal economic and political globalization determined that themes of trans-regional exchange in earlier periods would preoccupy art historians—a group also belatedly but enthusiastically grappling with postmodern theory in multifarious forms. Daniels’s pioneering Fields of Vision (1991) began to challenge the national paradigm by exploring parallels and relationships between British and American landscape painting and print culture.¹² New Atlanticist perspectives on political and intellectual history opened up the possibility of a “new British history”, whose implications for art historical study have only slowly been realized.

More urgently, the legacy of rethinking of cultural studies by Stuart Hall and the “Birmingham School”, led to an increasing focus on questions of race and representation, on questions of diasporic identity and the cultural legacies of slavery in the Caribbean and Britain. Paul Gilroy’s formulation of the “black Atlantic” was decisive in challenging the primacy of the nation as a unit of analysis, opening up a model of transnational movement that, albeit derived from the unique and incomparable trauma of chattel slavery, nonetheless opened up vivid possibilities for rethinking the history of art more generally.¹³ The national essentialism of post-war scholarship was assailed by concepts of ambivalence and hybridity, developed in post-colonial theory, notably in the work of Homi Bhabha; contact zones and the meeting and intertwining of cultures, analysed first in literary studies and anthropology, took on a new importance, with significant implications for the study of landscape imagery and for the canon of art history.¹⁴ Representations of landscapes of slavery, in which conventions of the picturesque and the sublime were often deployed in an attempt to present the plantation in the most favourable light, have been the subject of recent attention. Jill Casid’s Sowing Empire presciently drew attention to the relationship between the organization of the plantation and the conventions of representation; in Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement, Kay Dian Kriz navigated the links between the economics of the slave trade and the polite society, revealing fault lines that saw metropolitan visual satires offering burlesque images of planters in the Caribbean as debased and vulgar; while the elegant lithographs of Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, at the moment of slavery’s demise in 1838, attempted to “detoxify” the sugar islands through artful renderings of the plantation landscape. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, an exhibition held at the Yale Center for British Art in 2007, attempted to incorporate landscape imagery into a more general history of representations of slavery, utilizing Joseph Roach’s formulation of “circum-Atlantic exchange” as a single “oceanic interculture”.¹⁵ From the mid-eighteenth century, the Caribbean was a zone of constant reinvention, a nodal point of global trade, including the trade in human bodies, the site of pioneering, large-scale industrial organization, and a place where forced migration gave birth to new populations and hybrid cultural forms, especially in performance and the visual arts. It also constituted a series of landscapes, both in actuality and in representation.¹⁶

Early indications of the directions landscape scholarship would take in the new millennium were seen in summer 2001, in a conference, Art and the British Empire, which brought together scholars from across the world to begin, for the first time, to formulate a larger historical research project about art and empire, in which landscape would play a central role. The premise of the conference, and the collection of essays derived from it, was that the concept of empire (hitherto largely shunned by art historians) “belongs at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art.”¹⁷ William Blake, inevitably, long ago floated a more radical proposition: “Empire follows Art, & not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”¹⁸ Perhaps, then, art belongs at the heart of the history of empire. It was clear to the organizers that this project could only be successful if it embraced a multiplicity of viewpoints from across the former territories of empire rather than asserting a metropolitan narrative. The conference was, after all, supported by Yale University, a quintessential product of the colonies, whose founding donor, Elihu Yale, was an East India Company official in Madras, who had been born in New Haven, Connecticut.¹⁹ And though, in an event deliciously laced with irony, the delegates in 2001 enjoyed a memorable reception in the Durbar Court of the Foreign Office, seemingly re-enacting the paying of homage by vassal states to the imperial overlord, the conference provided a highly productive meeting of scholars and curators from across the world.

As the twenty-first century dawned, the long-running debates engendered by Edward Said’s Orientalism, the landscape imagery of David Roberts, William Holman Hunt, Edward Lear and, especially, John Frederic Lewis, come to the fore.²⁰ Moreover, the work of British artists in India, hitherto the subject of a connoisseurial literature redolent of colonialist attitudes, became a subject of new literature inflected with a new urgency by the emergence of post-colonial theory.²¹ The most significant response to British landscape aesthetics in colonial India is Romita Ray’s Under the Banyan Tree, a study alert to the poetics, as well as the politics of representations under colonialism.²² A larger literature has engaged with landscape photography in India from the late 1850s onwards, in which conventions of the picturesque and the panoramic, established earlier and disseminated through print media, play a significant role.²³

New work on landscape painting in Australia, Aotearoa—New Zealand, and South Africa has revealed both the global reach of landscape conventions and formulae, and the impediments offered to the totalizing “colonial picturesque” by local geographies and by what Julia Lum, deploying in relation to landscape painting a concept from the anthropologist Bronwen Douglas, has described as “indigenous countersigns”.²⁴ The British artist John Glover in Tasmania, the artist-ethnographer George French Angas in New Zealand, the painter-explorer Thomas Baines in South Africa, among countless others, encountered limit-cases where topography and culture exerted a powerful counterforce, limiting the controlling power of the imperial landscape idiom, and generating troubling, but historical important and aesthetically powerful landscapes for which new interpretative strategies are demanded. The work of contemporary indigenous artists increasingly offers critical reflections on the continuing power of landscape as a contested space open to multiple interpretations, and as a site of historical and contemporary violence. Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], (2015–2017), on display at the time of publication in the exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, responds to the historical provocation of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, a scenic coloured wallpaper in twenty panels, created in 1804 by Joseph Dufour on the basis of imagery from the Pacific voyages of James Cook (Les Voyages du Capitaine Cook was proposed as an alternative title for the paper) (Fig. 2).²⁵ Reihana’s panoramic video spanning 26 metres embraces the “monarch of all I survey” viewpoint of the painted panoramas of the late eighteenth century, but inserts speaking, singing, and moving figures to contest the silent, stereotypical representations of indigenous people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. Reihana offers partial insights into indigenous cosmologies that contest the Enlightenment’s insistence on global normativities, insisting on the validity of traditional knowledges and the limitations of Western perception. “Both the wallpaper and the video are set in a utopian Tahitian landscape,” explains Reihana, “yet while Dufour’s work models Enlightenment beliefs of harmony among mankind, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] includes encounters between Europeans and Polynesians which acknowledge the complexities of cultural identities and inter-cultural contact in the age of Empire.”²⁶ It is a landscape of misunderstanding, a contact zone of misconception, which is both a landscape of possibility, a space of resistance, and potentially the terrain of terrible violence.

While some recent writers have followed Kenneth Clark in suggesting that there was a “death of landscape” at the end of the nineteenth century, the eclipse of traditional media such as large-scale exhibition paintings of landscape subjects was accompanied by a proliferation of landscape imagery across media, notably photography and, above all, film.²⁷ Continuities abound. The “panning shots” of the motion picture industry—think of the widescreen imagery of the American wilderness ubiquitous in Westerns from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), or the sweeping desert scenes in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962)—derive directly from the painted panorama patented by Robert Barker in 1787, mediated through Turner and American painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Moran.

In addition to its presence across popular culture, landscape seems have returned to prominence in the fine arts in Britain at moments of enforced insularity. The neo-Romantic painters of the 1930s—Paul Nash, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland—seem to have moved towards landscape painting as a redemptive haven from totalitarian encroachment, enhanced by layer upon layer of comforting vernacular inscription, from standing stones to Georgian stables. British variants of Abstract Expressionism, such as powerful canvases of Peter Lanyon, always seem to allude to land, sea, and sky; artists inclined towards abstraction gathered at St Ives, for the same reason that earlier colonies had formed at Cullercoats, Staithes, and Newlyn, because of the magnificence of the surrounding scenery.

Land and landscape are once again at the heart of contemporary political debates in the era of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States. As all but a tiny cadre of extractive capitalists now acknowledge, climate change and global warming are perhaps the most pressing issues facing civilization: landscapes worldwide are visibly changing and the emergence of what might be described as a planetary consciousness—with the exception of the crass and recidivistic leadership of the United States—seems to be taking place on the terrain of landscape. Histories of landscape painting are, increasingly, conscious not only of the trans-regional and the inter- and intra-imperial, but also of the global in a real and immediate sense. In the “anthropocene”, the geological era in which the effects of human life have decisively changed the planet’s environment, climate is a matter of survival with profound consequences for aesthetics (David Matless recently coined the term “Anthroposcenic” to illuminate this conjunction).²⁸ The results of man-made environmental change preoccupy, indeed haunt, the projects of scholars of landscape today, just as increasing numbers of contemporary artists are registering in their work, with mounting horror, the accelerated rate of climate change and despoliation.

This new awareness of landscape as the ground upon which macro-historical forces play out their dramas loops us back historically to the moment of British landscape painting’s triumph in the age of Romanticism. If we can now identify the early nineteenth century as the origin point of the Anthropocene, then this new era in global history was ushered in by the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, whose embrace of the apocalyptic sublime has never seemed more prescient. The landscape painter Thomas Cole, born in the overcrowded, polluted industrial city of Bolton, Lancashire, in 1801, met both Turner and Martin in London in 1829–1830. He wrote to a patron in 1832 to describe a projected cycle of landscape paintings, conceived in London, that he would name The Course of Empire. Utilizing terms that resonate with modern ecological thinking, he proposed to paint:

the History of a Natural Scene, as well as an Epitome of Man; showing the natural changes of Landscape, and those effected by Man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization—to the state of Luxury—to the vicious state or states of Destruction etc.²⁹

The malign effect of humanity on the landscape was the central premise of Cole’s artistic project: he was a pioneering artist of the Anthropocene, proleptic in his melancholy sense of impending catastrophe. An exhibition of his work held in 2018, exactly 200 years after he and his family, economic migrants, landed on the shores of the young United States, revealed Cole to be far from being the provincial, nationalistic American figure—“the father of the Hudson River School”—of the established historiography. Rather, horrified by the emergence of global capitalism and empire, avid in its advocacy of protection for the American wilderness, predictive of environmental catastrophe, his vision seems, uncannily, to speak of “landscape now” (Fig. 3).³⁰