Visions of England: Or Why We Still Dream of a Place in the Country by Roy Strong

Author:Roy Strong [Strong, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409029366
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

In his Observations, Gilpin taught such visitors how to respond to the scenery. Goodrich Castle is ‘correctly picturesque’: a sublime and noble pile soaring above the afforested banks below which stretched a more tranquil rural scene with cottages adding ‘animation and interest to the scenery’. Halfway to Monmouth, tourists could admire Coldwell, an amphitheatre of towering cliffs and ‘mouldering perpendicular rocks, which assumed the most fantastic forms’. Finally there was Tintern Abbey, ‘a very enchanted piece of ruin’, weathered by the hand of Time with creeping ivy, moss and lichen adding to its beauty.

The discovery of England was greatly facilitated by the outbreak of war with France in 1793. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were to last for over twenty years, which meant that a whole generation of English people were unable to travel on the Continent – a situation similar to that created by the two world wars in the twentieth century, to which I shall return later. Out of this isolation in the late eighteenth century came the discovery of England, Wales and Scotland. In the case of England it was to sanctify two tracts of the countryside – the Wye Valley and the Lake District.

Gilpin precipitated a steady stream of guidebooks. Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes (1778), which had gone through twelve editions by 1812, took visitors on a set route with fixed viewpoints in the Gilpin manner, rather like today’s coach stops where tourists are bidden to step out and snap an obligatory panorama. Yet even now we still cherish the views described by West as quintessentially iconic views of England. Here is what he wrote on a dull autumn day as he approached Ullswater from Dunmallet:

From hence I saw the lake opening directly at my feet, majestic in its calmness, clear and smooth as a blue mirror, with winding shores and low points of land covered with green inclosures, white farm-houses looking out among the trees, and cattle feeding. The water is almost every where bordered with cultivated lands to a quarter of a mile in breadth, till they reach the feet of the mountains, which rise very rude and awful with their broken tops on either hand.

At the end of the eighteenth century this new view of landscape was intensified by Romanticism, which recast the role of the artist away from public man to someone who in his work enshrined a deeply personal way of looking at the world. To the Romantic artist what the inward eye perceived was more important than what the outward eye observed.

If we had to choose one painter who, above every other, embodied the essence of English landscape painting and at the same time took on this new role of the artist, it could only be John Constable (1776–1837). Today we tend to forget that his pictures were nothing short of revolutionary; indeed, he was only grudgingly admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of forty-three. The subject of almost all his paintings was the vicinity

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