English arts
PAUL GRINKE
English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700-1750 Christopher Hussey (Country Life 63s) Water-Colour Painting in Britain Martin Hardie (Batsford 126s) We can modestly claim that England's two unique contributions to European art have been landscape gardening and watercolour painting. Both' are peripheral arts, almost glosses on a predominantly rural society, and both are closely linked to the vagaries of the English climate. A small cache of new titles on these subjects should be a welcome addition to any- one's shelves.
Impossible not to welcome any reissue of Christopher Hussey's The Picturesque, a pioneer work as seminal for its time as Ken- neth Clark's Gothic Revival, Roger Fry's Vision and Design or Clive Bell's After Cizanne. But how mean the new reprint is. Admittedly the original is a costly and almost unprocurable book and the illustrations have naturally suffered after forty years, but must we put up with the senseless division, into a pair of meagre cropped plates, of Payne Knight's carefully chosen contrast between the smooth lawns of the Brownian landscape. and the rugged emboskage of the picturesque school? Mr Hussey admits that much detailed research has gone on since the first publication of The Picturesque in 1927, but rightly insisted that the book should be reissued as a document of its time. The sub-title 'Studies in a point of view' not only refers to the Picturesque theorists but to the climate of aesthetic opinion in the 1920s.
Edmund Burke's essential characterisation of the Sublime—'it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther or rhinoceros' formed a charter for romantic art and poetry, and was eagerly reproduced on a domestic scale in the English gardens of the time. Perhaps a hint of it remains at Woburn Zoo, though the genuine frisson of confronting a lion in an English park is hard to reproduce today. A palatable version of the 'horrid' was the declared aim of the most ambitious garden theorists, a realisation in massed rocks, mountain torrents and dark woods of the sort of thrill that the tormented hero got when he finally spotted Frankenstein's ,monster across the ice field: 'a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I uttered a wild cry of ecstasy when I distinguished a sledge and the distorted proportions of a well-known form within.' Substitute hedge for sledge and you can almost hear the delicious cries of horror from the drawing-room window.
Christopher Hussey's new book English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700-1750—and it is a new book and not just a compilation of old essays—should be essential reading for anyone remotely interested in the development of the English landscape. These essays, covering such great estates as Castle Howard, Stowe, Stour- head and a number of lesser houses, form a practical investigation of the theories which Hussey dealt with in the early chapters of The Picturesque. The half-century represented here shows the genesis of the picturesque and its careful moulding in the hands of Bridgeman and Kent. It was the age of elegant ruins, smooth calculated vistas and monumental porticoes—everything the latter half of the century scorned. Fortunately most of the houses and gardens exist relatively unaltered today (though some, especially Stourhead, have been deformed by injudicious planting) and many are accessible to the public. The book is sensibly divided into a group of introductory chapters orgabising the period into topics such as the sources and evolution of landscaping, the painter's and poet's attitude and a detailed investigation of the Palladian bridge, one of the most elegant if fanciful themes of the age, followed by a series of descriptive chapters detailing the growth and planning of individual gardens. The illustrations, as one has come to expect from Country Life books, are fully worthy of the text.
With the second volume of .Martin Hardie's monumental history of watercolour 'painting in England we have reached a point where the gulf between the brilliant professional and the cheerful amateur has widened to the point of exclusion. Ellen : 'Oh, my dear Miss K, I am quite in despair. You surely must have made some mistake in the colours you told me to make use of for Mamma's portrait. I did just as you bid me, and yet see what a horrible thing I have made.' Thus helpless Ellen in Emma Kendrick's Conversations on the art of miniature painting (1833). Compare the words of the master David Cox to his bio- grapher W. Hall who had asked what was to be done with some obtrusive specks in the sky of a drawing, 'Specks! Specks! Why, put a couple of wings and turn them into birds.' Poor Ellen would never have thought of that one.
Martin Hardie was uniquely qualified to tackle this vast subject, with thirty-seven years at the Victoria and Albert Museum where he was largely responsible for rehabilitating the neglected school of William Blake, Samuel Palmer and the visionary romantics. More important, and I think the making of the book, was his own involvement in watercolour painting and intimate knowledge of the materials and processes which bore fruit in fascinating digressions on the texture of paper and the vagaries of colour. Skilful editing and additional material by Jonathan Mayne, Dudley Snelgrove and Basil Taylor should make the complete three-volume work the ultimate assessment of the whole school after Iolo Williams.
The present volume covers the Romantic period, the heyday of the great names: Girtin, Turner, Constable and Cotman. Much of it is familiar territory in contrast to the com- parative novelty of the first volume but, if there are few unfamiliar names, the value of a well-considered continuous narrative linking individual biographies and specialist studies of schools easily makes up for any feeling of tread- ing a well-trodden path. The illustrations are obviously crucial and the collotype _process, though very faithful as a means of reproduc-
lion, is inadequate for conveying the full tonal value of watercolour and gives a dreary uniformity to what is after all a marvellously eclectic period. The few colour plates are magnificent but sadly devoted to a handful of masterpieces.
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