Landscapes of Consequence: English Landscape Painting in Some Recent Exhibitions

Abstract

It would be a foolish critic who now dared to consider English landscape painting in isolation from continental traditions, and a positively perverse one who regarded artists such as Constable and Gainsborough as untaught 'innocent eyes'; indeed it has sometimes seemed as if the very failure of a painter to travel abroad has been an extra provocation to historians to search out continental influences on his work. Recognition of the impact of the Dutch school on artists from Samuel Scott in the eighteenth century to Andrew Geddes in the nineteenth (to spread the parameters widest) should, following Professor Bachrach's Shock of Recognition exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1970-71, no longer come as a 'shock', even if it could really be said to have done so then; and Bachrach has now pursued his theme more specifically in an article on 'Turner, Ruisdael and the Dutch', contributed to the first issue of the new journal Turner Studies. Alongside Constable and Turner, Gainsborough was inevitably a hero of Bachrach's selection of ten years ago, but even so, Dr. Hayes' recent exhibition at the Tate went still further in emphasising Netherlandish influence on Gainsborough's landscape style; and the National Gallery has since brought together, in one of its continuing series of 'Second Sights', its Watering Places by Gainsborough and Rubens. No less familiar to the modern eye is the influence of the Roman classical or historic landscape on English painters, which formed a major theme of last summer's exhibition at Kenwood, in