British Artists and the Modernist Landscape

Ysanne Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138710795
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351771818
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Title first published in 2003. In this detailed study of the landscapes and rural scenes of Britain and France made by artists like George Clausen, Philip Wilson Steer, Augustus John, Laura Knight, J. D. Fergusson and Spencer Gore, Ysanne Holt investigates the imaginary geographies behind the pictures and reconsiders the relationship between national identity, 'Englishness' and the native landscape. Combining close investigation of important works with a broader enquiry into the appeal of the Mediterranean for an age preoccupied with cultural degeneracy and bodily health, Ysanne Holt draws fascinating conclusions about the impact of modernism on the British tradition of landscape painting.

1

Poetry of the peasant

By the 1890s the inhabitants of the countryside were already well perceived in the urban middle-class imagination as embodying the finest qualities of the national character. In the words of Masterman’s The Heart of Empire, they were a ‘healthy, energetic population reared amidst the fresh air and the quieting influence of the life of the fields’.¹ Actual conditions amongst rural workers were obviously misrepresented in accounts like this for, in real terms, years of severe agricultural depression had resulted in that steady exodus to the cities.² With low agricultural wages and poor housing, together with the lure of potential opportunity in the city, despite dire warnings, the younger generation simply lacked the incentives to stay on the land.³

To a political and cultural elite, such a situation threatened disastrous implications. Imperialist statesmen like Lord Milner, echoing Montague Fordham, uttered sentiments which extended widely across class and political persuasions: ‘Of all forms of productive capacity … there is none more vital, indispensable and steadying than the application of human industry to the cultivation of the soil.’⁴ But a substantial shift in ideological representation had been necessary before this view could become widely acceptable.⁵ This chapter deals with the role of images of the rural worker presented in popular exhibitions from the mid-i890s in a process that, at first obliquely, exposed the tension between modernity and modernism.

The impulse of painters like George Clausen, Edward Stott and Henry Herbert La Thangue to record passing ways of life in the countryside was, of course, common amongst writers from Thomas Hardy to Richard Jefferies in the 1870s and 1880s. But there was still, in the 1890s, a strong sense in which representations of field-workers witnessed a desire to ‘fix’ an image of those who were in danger of turning into unruly industrial proletarians.⁶ The results of the artist’s or writer’s attentions were therefore clearly determined, laden with preconceptions, half-remembered facts mingled with wishful thinking. All of this was conditioned by Edward Thomas’s perceptions in 1913 of a ‘modern sad passion for nature’, and the awareness that ‘the countryman is dying out and when we hear his voice, as in George Bourne’s “Bettesworth Book”, it is more foreign than French. He had long been in decline and now he sinks before the Daily Mail like a savage before pox or whisky. Before it is too late, I hope that the zoological society will receive a few pairs at their Gardens.’⁷ Clausen and La Thangue were engaged in a similar project - at once both preservationist and anthropological. Thus La Thangue was described in 1896 as ‘to some extent consciously perhaps, producing a series of pictures of the agricultural life of our time which is sure to have some permanent historical value’.⁸

Such a commemorative desire can be observed in Clausen’s renderings of ploughing, an activity he began to record in the mid-i88os and revisited in 1897 with Autumn Morning, Ploughing (Plate I). By this date the artist’s interests had shifted from the more direct treatment and detailed observation of earlier works like Ploughing, 1889, and there is in this later picture less of a literal description of an activity and instead an increasing sense of the subject as an icon, of the plough and ploughman as sign of a timeless, rural existence.⁹ Naturalist actuality declines before the impressionist ‘envelope’; artistic purpose changes in what becomes an inexorable process that increasingly implies a move towards a modernist reductivism. It is in this aesthetic process that the rural worker is transformed from a potentially troublesome malcontent to a decent, dignified and time-honoured land-worker.

Flora Thompson’s account of rural Oxfordshire during the 1880s, Lark Rise to Candleford, demonstrates that while, at that time, it was still possible to see ploughing teams at work, new developments were already visible. ‘Every autumn appeared a pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on each side of a field, drew a plough across and across by means of a cable. These toured the district under their own steam, for hire on the different farms.’¹⁰ Innovations like these were rarely, if ever, recorded by painters or photographers and were only described by ruralist writers in terms of regret. Paintings by Clausen and La Thangue obscured the fact that mechanization was advancing apace. In contrast to the intrusion of modern machines, the plough itself, according to Edward Thomas, was ‘a universal symbol’, ‘a sovereign beautiful thing which man has made in his time … the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a paean to their majesty’.¹¹ In the meantime it appeared as though traditional and specialist rural skills would be lost. By 1902, Rider Haggard’s ‘rural rides’ led him to conclude that before long, ploughmen ‘will be scarce indeed … the farm labourer is looked down upon, especially by the women of his own class, and consequently looks down upon himself’.¹² Significantly, on Haggard’s own farm the traditions of ploughing continued. He, like Clausen and Edward Thomas along with their reading and viewing public, all revealed the same anxieties which they attempted to displace in strikingly similar ways.

By the early 1890s the stylistic influence on Clausen of the French Naturalist painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage was in steady decline, and this had important consequences for the critical reception of his works.¹³ From this date ‘Rustic Naturalism’ was under attack from the increasingly influential ‘new critics’ like R. A. M. Stevenson, George Moore and D. S. MacColl, the last of whom dismissed the method as ‘a manual dexterity inspired by no real sentiment of vision’.¹⁴ In line with his elaboration of the idea of ‘congruous beauty’,¹⁵MacColl saw Naturalism’s failing in the extent to which ‘sentiment, subject and technique remained obstinately detached from each other, (whereas) good technique … is simply a way of seeing and feeling, and follows indistinguishably upon that impulse when the seeing has become clear’. Critics were therefore relieved when Clausen and La Thangue, those ‘giants of the period of the peasant child who stuck his boots in our faces, of the black open-air scene, of the square brush, with its halo of French wickedness’ abandoned the technique and ‘Mr Clausen … removed his peasants to a safe distance’.¹⁶ By this date Clausen’s allegiance had turned ostensibly to the figure compositions of Millet for, as he wrote in 1904: ‘No other has seen so clearly or shown so well the beauty and significance of ordinary occupations, the union of man with nature.’¹⁷

Clausen had first encountered Millet’s work at Durand-Ruel’s London gallery as early as 1872 and the artist was more widely popularized by biographical accounts like that of Julia Cartwright in 1896.¹⁸ His significance from the 1890s onwards, as revealed in exhibitions at the Grafton and Leicester galleries in 1905 and 1906 respectively, was increasingly understood to lie in the depiction of type and in the expression of action or sentiment, whereas Bastien’s interest was perceived to be in the quasi-scientific portrait of a specific individual in a particular environment - with all the worrying potential for brutal honesty that such a method might entail. By contrast, Millet’s example enabled Clausen to depict a symbolic and universal relationship between ‘peasant’ and place.

Aside, however, from the obvious debt to Millet, there were also signs of a renewed interest in the painters of the ‘idyllic school’ of the 1870s, of George Mason, George J. Pinwell and especially of Fred Walker. By the turn of the century, Walker was described in the approved critical terms of the period, those applied to Millet and, increasingly, to Clausen as well. According to Claude Phillips in 1905, Walker’s art, though it had absorbed foreign influences, was fundamentally national in feeling and character. His romanticism was tempered with realism and imagination, and in this he had drawn from the works of the French Salon painter Jules Breton, popular in England for pictures like La Fin de la Journée, with its ‘serene melancholy’ and ‘the idyllic grace which he infuses into modern rustic life’.¹⁹ Millet’s Gleaners and The Angelus, later to find echoes in the works of Clausen and La Thangue, had also already influenced Walker in terms of ‘the increased effort to infuse into the treatment of rustic and open air subjects, a certain rhythmic harmony’²⁰ - again presaging the simple and rudimentary relationship between the figure and the earth that emerged throughout early modernism across Europe. In all instances there was an attempt to ‘see men and things in a large synthetic way, to express the beauty and harmony of the type, not the individual; to marry the human element to the environing landscape so that one cannot be conceived of without the other’. The result was a unity of impression, simplicity of intention and a truthful atmospheric envelopment. But in spite of the derivations from French painting, for this writer, Walker remained ‘one of the most English of the modern English painters’, and he spoke of his ‘wistful tenderness which goes so far to redeem our time of trouble and misgiving, in art as in life’.²¹

Bound up with these aesthetic considerations was not only the desire to confirm a poetic national temperament but, as a direct effect of the modern reaction against Naturalism, a tendency to caricature the countryman to the extent that real individuality is lost. It was therefore possible and acceptable to speak of pictures of rural labourers as ‘representations of country life, impersonally considered, rather than as depicting any real human interest in the workers’.²² As Haldane MacFall stressed in relation to Clausen, ‘He takes just those exquisite ordinary scenes [and] these he puts down for us in that broad colour sense in which our memory retains them … in all essential truths.’²³ To deal in essentials or ‘types’ allowed for a discriminating vision, and by implication, one that could omit nagging detail and fact. As Dewey Bates remarked: ‘The poetry of the peasant lies in the eye that sees.’²⁴

The cleansing and purifying aspect of this approach is therefore crucial. Discussing Edward Stott, the critic of The Art Journal observed that his pictorial vision had ‘enabled him to strip actuality of ugliness’.²⁵ As his comment reveals, despite the evasions and mythologies, the real conditions of rural life were widely appreciated, both the conditions of rural housing and the physical condition of the worker as well. In spite of national antagonisms it was generally accepted that the peasant in France was rather more picturesque than in Britain: ‘There is less squalor there, and … the painter is less tempted to over-idealize or conventionalize his subjects in an effort to impart to them what he conceives to be a proper measure of charm and poetic significance.’ By contrast:

The British peasants have lost the character which made them formerly worthy of the artist’s attention; they have got out of relation to nature, their life has become conventionalized, and their costume has degenerated into ugliness. They dress in the cast-off clothes of their superiors, in things inappropriate to their employment and out of keeping with their surroundings, so that they never seem to be properly in the picture.²⁶

By the 1890s, young labourers had cast aside traditional ‘peasant garb’ of smock and gaiters which they now perceived as a sign of servility. But, on occasion, painters still depicted past forms of dress, as did La Thangue in his Old Peasant, in the collection of Sharpley Bainbridge of 1898.²⁷ The fact that few seriously believed that peasants still looked like this was exactly the point. Reality was indeed persistent, making La Thangue’s images less believable yet at the same time more affecting. So to return to Baldry, to get ‘out of relation to nature’ presupposed a concept of nature that, like the photographer Peter Henry Emerson’s images of East Anglian life, was harmonious, poetic and picturesque - that is Tike a picture’. Any encroachment of modernity into the rural communities was both culturally and aesthetically disagreeable. It was threatening to traditional order in class terms as well as national art traditions.

Edward Stott’s works were perhaps the most successful in terms of a distancing from modernity in the critical opinion of the later 1890s. Reviewers spoke of his romanticism and poetic discernment, and this was attributable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Landscape and modernity
• 1 Poetry of the peasant
• 2 The joys of sight
• 3 Seeking classic lands
• 4 Landscapes and rhythm
• 5 A sympathetic country
• 6 An ideal modernity: Spencer Gore at Letchworth
• 7 Dwellers in the innermost: mystery and vision
• Leaving the landscape
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index