Landscape Art
How natural do you think our natural landscape is? Have a guess.
The natural landscape of Britain that I have loved, painted and used as inspiration for prints and jewellery has mostly been tamed and altered by man and animal interventions. If sheep didn’t graze the Lake District it would all be forest. Exmoor and Dartmoor would be completely different without animal intervention caused by man and his need to eat, be warm and make a living and we would not have fields bound by hedgerows planted to enclose common land.
The great outdoors has always been a very dangerous place for friend and foe. As hunters you were contending with wolfish competition for your meat until fairly recently. At present there is a movement to re-introduce the wolf back into the highlands. Perhaps their prey would be you when both were hungry.
For humans life outside home was dangerous, life threatening and frightening, but it was where your food was.
There was a reason that the forest was cleared the length of a bowshot from most thoroughfares by medieval rulers. This mostly stopped the robbing and even murder of travellers by outlaws or wolfs heads as they were called. Robin Hood sounds wonderful but was probably a trick of the romantic imagination.
Generally if something frightens us we try to change it. But also needs must. The question of how to provision castles and fortified buildings led to the growing of vegetables within the fortifications – small market gardens. Look at the kitchen gardens of the monasteries. Some land has been tamed! The idea of strip farming where an area is divided up to provide the work force some arable land belonging to the feudal lord whilst food animals were grazed on common land has left its’ mark on the countryside as shown in Hoskins’ book The Making of the English Landscape.
Talking of taming outside England, just look at Pieter Brughels’ painting Hunters in the Snow and how organised the whole scene is. Do you think that is due to the Netherlands being a small country and the Dutch people ace at planning?
If you.ve been to any kitchen garden in England the order imposed on nature is staggering too. Nature has been tamed and is working hard for man.
Quickly following on was the idea of the garden for pleasure, a beautiful example being at Kenilworth Castle, in the garden designed to please Elizabeth I by Robert Dudley who had still not quite given up his plans of becoming Elizabeths’ husband. A totally tamed and organised space, it is exquisitely well-ordered and is a visually stunning piece of gardening history as unlike the natural world as it could be!
Gardens were seen as exhibitions of wealth, power and status and the job of garden designer became prestigious as the Upper and Upper Middle classes found it safe to enjoy life outdoors. We now see three types of landscape: really natural (wild and untouched, more of this later), farmed and somewhat cultivated and the garden used for growing and amusement.
The next change to the idea of Landscape Gardening was to invent the Vista, again an idea for the rich and (in)famous.
For those with loads of acres to spare, why not plan your garden to look as if it extended for miles and miles? Not a fence in sight…. There was one bloke who was a wizz at designing this type of vista – “Capability” Brown. He would even draw his clients plans showing the landscape now, in twenty, thirty, forty and so on years’ time. His plans moved villages, rivers, trees – almost everything, to create the right Classical Vista for his client and instead of fences, Hahas were installed, a cunning piece of groundwork engineering to prevent farm animals from invading the garden. In these Vistas you would often see a classical tower, ruin, pantheon, church or bridge. If you look at the gardens at Stowe you can see this beautiful ideal of the classical world and one that has given me much inspiration for my art.
At about the same time as all this “taming” was taking place another interest was evolving; that of tourism. Tourism to the really wild and woolly bits of the British landscape that had evaded any form of re-constituting. So Parts of Wales, Scotland, the Lake District, the Moors all of which were considered to have a Romanticism about them became classed as tourist attractions and used as inspiration for art, particularly on the spot watercolour and literature
However most of this recording of the English Landscape was primarily made from pocket book sketches made into finished works in the studio (well, you run the risk of embedding insects into your paint if you use the stuff out of doors!).
In the 19th cent. British artists John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner made a point of painting outdoors or plein aire. The Impressionists were hooked on this, but interestingly although some of Monets’ landscape and garden images show fantastic use of paint, colour and light, his own garden at Giverney is remarkably formal, the exception being his painting of the bridge over the lily pond and the bridge itself.
Landscape Gardening on a more modest scale became a passion around the late 19th cent. and has remained an ever popular and growing addiction. Just look at the designs of Gertrude Jeckel.
We are now a nation of amateur gardeners inspired by the many programs on T.V. that channel ideas for make-overs of both small and much larger plots. The flying gardener in the 1980s made a splendid garden for a farmhouse in Northamptonshire that has matured beautifully. Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don amongst many others make unmissable viewing.
Interestingly when the Council House movement was being planned it was considered very important to give each house land to grow enough vegetables to feed a family, along with the allotment system which is still thriving.
Some businesses with philanthropic owners. Cadbury, Bournville and Lister Kaye built model villages for their workers, each house having enough land for the family to grow their own fruit and veg and also to grow flowers, reminiscent of the “Cottage Garden” watercolours of early twentieth artists like Ethel Wane.
Now when we are told to produce more food and green power for our nation we appear to be in a battle between producing food, energy or warehousing. I wonder how we will resolve this and how our artists will find inspiration with what appears to be coming.
What do you think?
