Antiquity and Improvement in the National Landscape: The Bucks’ Views of Antiquities 1726–42

Abstract

Andrew Kennedy studied at the Courtauld Institute and was awarded his PhD in 1998. His doctoral thesis was a study of British topographical print series 1720–1840, focusing on the marketing of an imagery of national and local identities to diverse and changing domestic audiences. He has a chapter, ‘Representing the Three Kingdoms: Hanoverianism and the Virtuosi’s Museum’, in the multi–authored volume to be published shortly, based on the proceedings of the 2001 ‘Landscape and Politics’ conference. His article, written jointly with Annie Richardson, ‘Blotting and Blurring One against the Other: Reynolds, Gainsborough and Narratives of the Artist’, was published in the Oxford Art Journal, January 2002. He has taught at Winchester School of Art and Reading University, among other institutions, and currently teaches at Kingston and East London Universities and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.This article examines the possible contemporary meanings of the engraved views of English and Welsh antiquities published between 1726 and 1742 by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck. The category of ‘antiquity’ automatically existed in a binary relation to the category of ‘improvement’ at this period (as it still does, in some sense). William Stukeley, who was very much associated with the Bucks’ project, found that engravings were ideal for capturing and rendering manageable the promiscuous variety of Britain’s landscape, with its mixture of antiquity and improvement, as it presented itself to the traveller. The nation’s past history, as evidenced by these medieval remains, legitimated and was simultaneously redeemed by a dynamic, improving present, one which a number of the Bucks’ subscribers were actively involved in constructing. Not only are the plates invariably dedicated to the owners of the remains that they depict, but antiquarian study itself is linked to a wider state of propertied prosperity. Given this context, it does not seem so strange, for example, that a series depicting mainly ‘Gothic’ antiquities should attract subscriptions from leading proponents of English Palladianism, that classicizing, modernizing, improving style, when it might be thought that they would have patronized Romano–British antiquarianism exclusively.