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Pastures Green & Dark
Satanic Mills The British Passion for
Landscape
Edited by Tim Barringer &
Oliver Fairclough
New York: American Federation of Arts, In association with D. Giles Limited, London, 2015 Paperback. 232 p. ISBN 978-1885444431. £26
Reviewed by Jacques Carré Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 4
This beautifully
illustrated exhibition catalogue was published on the occasion of an exhibition of British
landscape views which toured the United States in 2015 and 2016. These 88
paintings, watercolours and photographs all belong to the collections of
Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The Museum was founded in
1907 and owes its exceptional wealth of landscape pictures to donations by the
Davies sisters in the 1950s and more recently by the Graham Sutherland Foundation. The catalogue
is divided into six sections following a roughly chronological order, although
filiations between old masters and later artists are occasionally suggested.
Thus the reader is reminded of the influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator
Rosa on Richard Wilson and Thomas Wright of Derby. Less familiar are Graham
Sutherland’s and John Piper’s affinities with the early 19th-century mystical
painter Samuel Palmer. In his introduction Tim Barringer rehearses the classic story
of the British love for landscape, with its paradoxical heyday in the late
Georgian and early Victorian ages, a time when industrialisation and new
transport networks were disfiguring the countryside. Although the exhibition is
entitled Pastures Green & Dark
Satanic Mills, there is a clear imbalance in favour of rural landscapes in
the Cardiff collections as well as elsewhere. In a useful
essay Oliver Fairclough traces the special appeal of Welsh mountains for
landscape painters. From the mid-18th century to our age of land-art, Wales has
been a favourite territory for artists as well as tourists. Native artists like
Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones, after their return from the Grand Tour, did
not fail to paint Welsh scenes. What is more, artists and tourists were often
linked by relations of patronage. Thus connoisseurs like Thomas Pennant and
Watkin Williams-Wynn were not only Georgian forerunners of travellers in search
of the picturesque, but they also encouraged the production of pictures such as
Paul Sandby’s XII Views in North Wales
(1776). The greatest watercolourists of the age, Thomas Girtin, John Cotman and
David Cox, followed in their wake. J.M.W. Turner, another enthusiastic
traveller, is particularly well represented in the National Museum of Wales.
Two major oil paintings (including The
Storm, c.1840) and eight watercolours are shown in the exhibition. The
section on the sublime is complemented by rarely seen works by lesser-known
artists like Henry Clarence Whaite (The
Shepherd’s Dream, c. 1865) and, unexpectedly, Edward Lear. The following section,
rather awkwardly entitled ‘Truth to Nature’, lumps together purely
topographical artists like John Brett and highly imaginative painters like
Thomas Jones and John Constable (A
Cottage in a Cornfield, 1817). Interestingly it also illustrates the work
of several Victorian photographers like Calvert Richard Jones, John Dillwyn
Llewelyn and Roger Fenton, who often borrowed the conventions of landscape
painting in order to vindicate their status as artists. The industrial
and urban side of the exhibition begins under the aegis of the sublime, with
John Warwick Smith’s sensational view of open-cast copper mines and Thomas
Hornor’s emblematic Rolling Mills (c.
1817), with light effects reminiscent of Loutherbourg’s industrial scenes.
However, this kind of formula rapidly became repetitive, as in Lionel Walden’s
views of Cardiff at night. True modernity was more clearly stimulated by the
London landscape. There is a wonderful series of paintings of the Thames, from
Claude Monet’s atmospheric Charing Cross
Bridge (1902), to Léon de Smet’s pointillist Waterloo Bridge (1915) and Oskar Kokoschka’s gaudy London : Waterloo Bridge (1926). We
also find tamer London views from members of the Camden Town Group such as
Harold Gilman. The appeal of
the Welsh rural landscape continued throughout the 20th century and beyond. The
fine modernist works of Graham Sutherland, Ceri Richards and John Minton
illustrated here no longer convey any sense of place but tend to abstraction.
They form a strange contrast with the classically figurative pictures of Cedric
Morris and Evelyn Dunbar. As for the recent photographs of land art in Welsh
settings by Richard Long and David Nash, they interestingly link up with the
late Georgian love of landscape aesthetics and quest for picturesque forms. Altogether
this attractive exhibition catalogue provides a fairly comprehensive view of
the British art of picturing landscape. It successfully combines work by the
greatest masters in the genre with the production of little-known and often
unjustly forgotten Welsh painters.
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