From late September to January (2011-2), the Holburne Museum in Bath mounted an exhibition of landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). It was the first exhibition of this kind for fifty years, according to the Museum. As such the collection has been splendidly presented, with an informative essay/catalogue by Susan Sloman. Susan Sloman has also written the standard monograph on Gainsborough's career in Bath. The exhibition will move on to Compton Verney from 11 February to 10 June 2012.
Gainsborough enjoyed painting landscapes. He performed his portraits.
However, this was not because landscape painting was any less fashionable or lucrative Obviously, the market preferred historical themes and portraits, under the cold stare of Denis Diderot. However, the professional and amateur markets were busy with landscapes. Gainsborough’s preference was psychological rather than pragmatic. For Gainsborough landscape painting was a subjective form of aesthetic meditation. Portraiture entailed interaction. Pattern books stimulated technique, such as that produced by Alexander Cozens, also a Bath inhabitant. Following him and Cennino Cennini in Il Libro Dell’Arte, Gainsborough often assembled models out of small rough stones, or lumps of rock that could be laid out on a table. It is well-known that not all of Gainsborough’s landscapes were painted from direct observation. Though the exhibition shows drawings by Gainsborough which reveal his acute eye and witness to detail.
What is unique to Gainsborough is the sheer spontaneity and fluidity of his brushwork and his faultlessly natural choice of colour. As such his role as one of the founders with Richard Wilson of the British Landscape School is assured, though the European influence of Poussin and Dutch Seventeenth Century painting is evident in both. As such the later achievements of John Crome, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, and John Sell-Cotman all state their dependence on Gainsborough. Jean-Baptiste Camille, Corot and the Barbizon school, especially and Diaz de la Pena, too, owe an allegiance to Gainsborough’s remarkable combination of unprompted, yet thought -through vision. From there a line can be drawn through the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists to Paul Nash and John Piper among Twentieth Century painters and David Hockney among contemporaries.
According to John Ruskin in Modern Painters and Sir Kenneth Clark's Preface to Landscape into Art landscape painting became the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant art", that led us to be "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity" . Clark’s account of landscapes however, comes across as rather empty and generalised. His list of assumptions such as the assimilation of descriptive symbolism, the desire to investigate nature, the wish for escape into the fantastic in order to alleviate our dependence on nature and that old chestnut, the nostalgia for a Golden Age are too clumsy to account for the achievement, even of the Romantic painters.
I argue for continuity between the tradition of landscape painting and what is dogmatically called non-figurative painting. A recent exhibition of Arshile Gorki’s paintings shows how the same qualities of vehemence, sane coherence and atmosphere to be found in great landscape pictures can be found in his so-called abstraction. Yet most contemporary criticism argues against this.
Modernist theory such as Greenberg’s advocacy of the “purity of the two-dimensional” does not take into account the relativity of the painterly medium that thrives on associations and allusions. Nor does Jencks’ discussion of “hesitant irony” in William Wilkins’ Figures With a Landscape get us any further in analysing the distilled ecstasy of great landscape art. Mere tongue-cheek playfulness and differing levels of meaning cannot account for the fact that what is revived, even provisionally still retains a continuity of meaning. In other words if the meaning was not there to be lost, it would not be losable: if it were not losable, what then the “dizzying fall?”
That “bottomless reduplication” much urged by Rosalind Krauss, still depends upon an identity to be first gained then lost. So too is the deceptively innovative idea of the “gaze.”You can look upon Gainsborough’s Landscape with a View of a Distant Village(c.1750), which is the glory of the show, as a text , or as the painter’s gaze representing a text, or as some backdrop to a theatrical or cinematic production in which the socially-conscious Gainsborough is the director and/or the editor, as Lacan would have us do. Yet what you look at, while indefinable, nonetheless still embodies an identity, or rather shifting range of identity.
Laurence Binyon has written of this quality in his work on John Crome and John Sell Cottman.
“For here there is no attempt to escape from the actual, no revolt; only the distillation of what is loveliest in an actual scene, without effort or vehemence, accomplished with the quietness of power. It seems, indeed, almost as if the scene had created itself upon the paper ; so unconscious, so lost in its subject, has been the working of the artist's mind. The drawing, once seen, haunts the memory ; it overflows with its own atmosphere ; it is scented with the dawn ; one hears the labourer's cry to his team in the early stillness, in the shadow of the sleepy elms ; one feels all the charm of the " sacred morning” … in the sanity of its beauty.”
If we look at the picture we see a quietness that in the words of Laurence Binyon, has almost created itself. The very liveliness of the human and animal figures in which cows and sheep react to a dog, barking at a bird, while two almost biblical figures rest and converse, defines its still power. In their haunting and limpid freshness, we do not taste the river and experience the mystic blueness of the sky because this is what rivers and skies really mean to us. Rather out of a range of possible meanings, or relative identities, we select those that come closest to what we want to taste and see. Yet this is never a fixed identity. You can come to it again and again and see related identities, such as those social realities discussed by Susan Sloman in the catalogue, but at no stage can it ever have a defined aesthetic identity, which is what Romantic, Modernist and Post Modernist critics insist on, even if it is to debunk it.
This does not mean the power to evoke landscape is indefinable. So long as we have any kind of art we will not be struck dumb long. What we define can only ever be an attribute, not a description of the genre. Some like Henri de Lubac would claim that the contemplation that utters and allows us to consider art is a natural capacity for mysticism. Just because we cannot equal that mystical essence does not mean this great plastic lyric of the English landscape and its tradition has no identity.
Sources:
- Binyon, Laurence(1897) John Crome and John Sell Cotman, London, Seeley And Co. Limited, Great Russell Street, New York : The Macmillan Company' 102.
- Clark, Sir Kenneth, (1949)Landscape into Art John Murray , London, Preface
- De Lubac, Henri ,Chrisliche Mystik in Begegnungmit den Weltreligionem J.Sudbrack ed. Das Mysterium und die Mystik (1974) Available from http://www.theologie-heute.de/MystikvorlesungI.pdf Downloaded 08/01/12
- Jencks, Charles, (1987) The Post-Avant-Garde; Painting in the Eighties,London Academy Editions' 61
- Diderot, Denis(1997) Diderot on Art ed. and tr. Goodman, J. and Crow, T. Vols 1and 2 Yale University Press, New Haven and London.passim
- Greenberg, Clement, Modern and Postmodern, Arts Magazine 54 (1980)64-6
- Krauss, Rosalind (1985) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge Mass. MIT Press
- Oppé, Adolph Paul (1954) Alexander and John Robert Cozens, Cambridge, Mass., 165-87;
- Sloman, Susan (2011), Gainsborough's Landscapes, London, Philip Wilson Publishers £14.99.
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
