Mr Gradgrind
Richard Shone
British Landscape Painting Michael Rosen- thal (Phaidon £15).
"This is primarily an iconographic study of the British landscape as depicted by British painters. You must look elsewhere for Richard Wilson in the Campagna or the impact of Constable and Turner in France or the artists of the two World Wars work- ing abroad. Michael Rosenthal is concerned with the meaning of landscape painting and the conventions through which artists achieved their ends. He divides these con- ventions into several categories which are theoretically distinct but which in practice invariably overlap.
Initially there was the landscape of inven- tory (what a great family accrued to itself around its house — acreage, woods, livestock, etc.) and here termed Prospect painting. Georgic or agricultural landscape (what actually happens in the fields) rose in the 18th century, sometimes embodying a social critique of country life. In mid- century increased travelling, curiosity and burgeoning taste led to the picturesque and sublime conventions — august sites, ruins, cathedrals, nature in the raw as found in the Lakes, Wales or Derbyshire. These modes continue into the 19th century (the georgic gaining the upper hand in Constable and the Norwich School). Rosenthal finds later 19th-century landscape iconographically barren (just 'views') and his assault on the difficult face of 20th-century landscape is a feeble affair. So unsympathetic is he to later developments that he ought to have stopped at about 1840.
There was room for a book which would contain within a broad survey some of the ideas pioneered by John Barre11 in The Dark Side of the Landscape and the recent emphasis in art history on minute iconographical points. But this is not that book. It falls apart. On the one hand the author has a theory to impart, resulting in an over-didactic text, and on the other, the publisher obviously wanted to sell an attrac- tively illustrated volume. It was designed to appeal to both the country lover and the student of art history. The former we can dismiss at once — lovers of the country are more interested in nature than art. Agricultural College libraries might stock a copy with benefit but no one is likely to find it indispensable to a walk, a Sunday drive or the week-end cottage (so scorned by the author). The student will find it interesting enough — there are provocative and il- luminating passages on, for example, the relation of the art and the literature of land- scape (Jonson, Thompson, Larkin, etc.) or the pictorial effects of enclosure. But Michael Rosenthal's approach is far too ex-
elusive to lend any feeling of profundity to his contemplation of what is, after all, one of the great elements of English culture.
The author regards fidelity to contem- porary social conditions as the sine qua non of the truth in the scene depicted. His pro- tective attitude to haymaker, labourer or stonebreaker lends a tone of committed earnestness to his prose. The workers in a landscape can do no wrong, unlike the ex- ploitative and generally philistine land- owners and gentry. The 'reality' of the former is contrasted with the 'artifice' of the latter. What surprise Rubens, in retire- ment, would have shown had he been told he was 'living out a literary idea' at the Château de Steen. Pity the painter who departs from anything but text-book clari- ty. Gainsborough gets it in the neck, for Rosenthal cannot quite place the social origins, accents and paypackets of the group in The Harvest Wagon. Palmer (ab- surdly underrated here) is castigated for the lack, in his Shoreham pictures, of any trace of contemporary agricultural upheavals. Possibly he was thoughtful enough not to have gone out with his paints on a day when there was rick-burning in Kent. The spiritual impulse which was Palmer's seems entirely foreign to the author's thinking. In a discussion of 300 years of British land- scape painting it is an outrageous omission.
But Rosenthal is not insensible to the purely pictorial attributes of landscape painting. He reaches out for the word 'beautiful' as others hold on to 'nice' and
recommends a felicitous passage of paint as a salesman might proffer a new range from Wilton. The overall fusion of subject, con- tent and presentation seems to elude him. I think this partly accounts for his dwindling acuity and enthusiasm for landscape post-1840. Victorian symbolic potency escapes him — not only at its broadest representation (the unifying properties of light, for example) but in the particularity of a landscape in relation to its figures, fre- quent in much late 19th-century art. His reading of Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd is alarmingly erroneous, missing all its symbolic density.
As soon as Rosenthal leaves the familiar critical chronology of earlier British art, he is at sea rather than on land. Some of the more inappropriate examples he illustrates were probably dictated by publisher's necessity rather than author's choice — the marginal Gore and the irrelevant Grant. At- tempts at pictorial analysis are made but a discussion of Paul Nash lamely finishes with 'he seems to have done paintings of landscape simply because he liked what he saw.' Bad luck Corot, Sisley, Cezanne. To say of Ivon Hitchens that he had 'an in- terest in landscape' is rather like saying Chardin had `an interest in still-life' or Renoir in women. The intense inspiration drawn from landscape by the St Ives painters in the Fifties is entirely omitted — but surely Lanyon and Hilton are descen- dants of the earlier Romantic school. Lan- yon made a distinctive contribution to the genre (and, presumably up this author's street, embodied in several works the in- dustrial impact of mining on the Cornish scene). Instead, Rosenthal gives us Tom Phillips's well sat-on Benches and an insipid Peter Blake (which limps also across the ti- tle page). David Bomberg, regarded by some as the greatest modern British land- scapist, is never mentioned.
Gertrude Stein once said that she liked a good view but that she liked to sit with her back to it. Rosenthal walks away. While his book can certainly be recommended, in its earlier pages, for the questions it airs and sometimes answers, and for its refreshing comments on some of the sacred cows of re- cent historical rehabilitation, it is in the end a frustratingly unsatisfactory approach. A theory of landscape that cannot encompass the worlds of the imagination, of spiritual release, of psychological motivation, diminishes both the concept of landscape painting and the artists from which it dedv-
'There's no stopping him, with his new fibreglass body.' ed. Its effect, after reading, is like a lesson from Mr Gradgrind whose reductive defini- tion of a horse is true enough, but truth at its least inspiring.
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