Force of nature
Andrew Lambirth
Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October Bath is nearly always a joy to visit, though in recent years it has become a focal point for the disaffected youth (and middle-aged) of the area, and I’ve known people say they feel safer at night walking around London. But the architecture remains beautiful and evocative, the Roman Baths are still a wonder and you can have a sumptuous tea at the Pump Room. There are good book shops and currently at the Victoria Art Gallery, down by Pulteney Bridge, is the second part of an exhibition devoted to the Romantic strain in English art.
Don’t be misled by the title: although in its entirety this is a wide-ranging exhibition, it was organised by Southampton Art Gallery (and thus draws heavily on that remarkable permanent collection) and was originally intended for a much larger musem. In Bath, restrictions of space mean the show had to be cut in half — but like an earthworm, both halves have continued to flourish. Part 1 dealt with the historical context, the Samuel Palmers, the Graham Sutherlands and the Paul Nashes, and Part 2 comes up to date with the Brotherhood of Ruralists. This is particularly fitting as the Ruralists lived (mostly) in the West Country and foregathered from time to time in Bath. But I’m not so certain about this notion of coming up to date. Although there are recent works here by the Ruralists, there is nothing by other Romantics who might be equally at home in such exalted company. I can think of a number of artists whose paintings embody a romantic landscape vision of the poetic and the particular: Jeffery Camp, George Rowlett and Julian Perry, to name but three. Is then this selection rather a predictable one? I shall attempt to answer that later.
As viewers who now visit the Victoria Art Gallery may have missed Part 1 of the exhibition, let me give you an idea of the ground it covered. The overarching theme is the effect of Samuel Palmer’s etchings on 20th-century British art (Sutherland called Palmer the English van Gogh), but to state it so baldly is not particularly helpful. Palmer did not spring fully armed from the head of Zeus, but was hugely under the influence of that arch visionary, William Blake. So the show in fact begins with Blake’s marvellous illustrations to Thornton’s ‘Pastorals of Virgil’ (generously given to Southampton as part of the David Brown Bequest). Palmer described them revealingly as: ‘Visions of little dells, and nooks and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisite pitch of intense poetry.’ He could have been writing about his own work that was to have such an influence on F. L. Griggs, and through him, on the early etchings of Graham Sutherland.
Sutherland gets a good showing in Part 1, not just his prints, but also a trio of oils on the theme of lanes and woodland pathways. Paul Nash, one of the greatest of British 20th-century landscape painters, is represented by delightful early works such as ‘Under the Hill’ (1912) and by major paintings such as ‘Landscape of the Megaliths’ (1934), ‘November Moon’ (1942) and ‘Eclipse of the Sunflower’ (1945). Please note the presence of such lesser lights as Paul Drury, Joseph Webb and Edgar Holloway, and comparative unknowns like Graham Robertson, John Lefevre and James Sellars. Good to see S. R. Badmin and John Elwyn too. The range is impressive, though I could have done with more than a single image by the brothers Spencer, Stanley and Gilbert, and the solitary Hitchens. Perhaps the idea needed to be focused better? A catch-all survey can give a confused flavour of a period or tendency, while a more discriminating selection can be paradoxically more informative.
However, Part 1 proved very popular in Bath, with nearly 16,000 visitors, many of them returning more than once. It reinforces my belief that the Romantic pastoral strain is the most original and deeply felt of our landscape manifestations in England. It’s not just reactionary nostalgia, but the identification of a powerful source of inspiration in the national psyche. If you still want to see Part 1, you could go to the next and last venue in the exhibition’s tour, Falmouth Art Gallery, where it will run from 20 September until 1 November. But Falmouth has even less space than Bath, so it will be showing a reduced version of the original show. Perhaps better to buy the catalogue (a substantial paperback priced at £19.95), though it is somewhat text-heavy and indigestible, and marred by misprints. The illustrations are also rather small. But I suspect it will be a useful sourcebook for many who do not have ready access to the originals.
Meanwhile, Part 2 presents Ruralist treasures. The Brotherhood was born at a dinner party on David Inshaw’s birthday in 1975, and was about escaping the modern urban world for something more expansive and Victorian. Peter Blake, the most famous Ruralist and in some respects its flag-waver, described their aims as: ‘The continuation of a certain kind of English painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, English landscape, the Pre-Raphaelites... our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic. We still believe in painting with oil on canvas, putting the picture in a frame and, hopefully, that someone will like it, buy it and hang it on their wall to enjoy.’ That’s a useful definition of the Romantic current in English art — the ability to recognise and convey the magic of a place. Although Peter Nahum, in an afterword to the catalogue, makes a strong argument for Graham Ovenden being the giant of late 20th-century English landscape painting, rightful successor to Paul Nash, I would disagree. For my money, David Inshaw is the artist who emerges as the strongest and most inventive of the Ruralists. He is a landscape painter of real evocative power — look at his depictions of the strangeness that is Silbury — whose best work seems to unite the qualities of Nash and Stanley Spencer. It’s his pictures that stand out in this exhibition. ❑
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