I’d never really looked at landscapes with cows until a student experience brought them sharply into focus. I was standing in front of one at a tutor’s party when I noticed the boy next to me staring at it. As I wondered what had so captured his imagination, he suddenly gasped, ‘God, I’m hungry!’
There are a lot of cows, and sheep, in Compton Verney’s new exhibition of landscapes from the Royal Academy’s collection, but they’re not there to whet the appetites of starving students. Rather, runs the thesis behind the show, their presence lends credibility to a pastoral vision of England designed to appeal to the new class of industrialist collector that came into being with the Royal Academy in 1768. Most of the landscapes here were painted in London for city walls. They reflect new money and new insecurities — hence the exhibition’s title, Opulence and Anxiety.
For its curator Tim Barringer, the show represents ‘an extraordinary opportunity to rummage in the repressed subconscious, as it were, of British landscape’. It is also a chance to dust off diploma works by half-forgotten RAs that have lain undisturbed in the vaults since first deposited. The fact that these works were self-selected, Barringer points out, gives the exhibition another USP as an independent insight into English art history uncoloured by Francocentric avant-garde prejudice.
The 50 paintings by 40 artists are hung in five rooms, sensibly arranged — to avoid anticlimax — around a hub of masterpieces: Gainsborough’s ‘Romantic Landscape’ (c.1783), Turner’s ‘Dolbadern Castle’ (1800) and Constable’s ‘A Boat Passing a Lock’ (1826), plus five oil sketches. A 1791 painting of the earthly paradise of Tahiti by the Resolution’s resident artist John Webber points up the escapist agenda of English landscape painting of the period: when not looking back to an idealised past, it looked into the far distance.
By Room 2, however, escapist horizons have narrowed: Victorian and Edwardian armchair travellers seem quite content with awaydays on the new suburban rail network. The young Benjamin Williams Leader (1831–1923) and George Vicat Cole (1833–93) entrain for Surrey in search of suitable subjects: Leader’s diploma work features a sandpit in Burrow’s Cross and Cole’s a field of sheep at autumn in Abinger. Sir George Clausen (1852–1954) cycles around Essex looking for locations like ‘Interior of an Old Barn’ (1908) that will serve as elegies for a lost way of life. Sir Alfred East (1844–1913) paints an evening in the Cotswolds with distant sheep, Sir John Arnesby Brown (1866–1955) a Norfolk raincloud with foreground cattle, and Alfred Parsons (1847–1920) orange lilies in his sunny Worcestershire garden, with fantailed doves. The only shadow is cast over Fittleworth, West Sussex by Charles Sims (1873–1928) in his strange allegorical painting ‘Clio and the Children’ (1913–15) showing a group of children in a meadow listening to the Muse of History reading from a bloodied scroll. Sims added the blood in 1914 after his eldest son was killed in the war.
By these standards Scotland ranked as comparatively exotic, and Academicians from across the border cashed in. Joseph Farquharson (1846–1935) milked his pet subject of sheep in the snow so mercilessly that he was dubbed ‘Frozen Mutton Farquharson’. John MacWhirter (1839– 1911) cornered the market in trees — though the two Scots pines forming his ‘Nature’s Archway’ (c.1893) also frame a flock of sheep — and Peter Graham (1836–1921) in Highland landscapes. His diploma painting features peat-gatherers, but he kept a model herd of Highland cattle handy on his Buckinghamshire property.
For a surprising number of Edwardian RAs it was as if Impressionism had never happened. As for Post-Impressionism, that shock was quickly absorbed into the cataclysmic shock of two world wars. The mood of Neo-Romantic retrenchment that followed is caught in John Nash’s ‘The Fallen Tree’ of 1951 and Gilbert Spencer’s chilly view ‘From My Studio’ of 1959, from which the absence of ruminants seems almost ominous. But the cows are back in brother Stanley’s queezily nostalgic ‘The Farm Gate’ of 1950, flattening his late lamented first wife Hilda against the gateway as they press into a Cookham farmyard for milking.
It was not until the 1910s that the first urban landscapes were submitted as diploma works. A sideways look at the Neo-Romantic city takes in one of the highlights of the show: a massive three-metre canvas by Algernon Newton of ‘The Regent’s Canal, Paddington’ (1930). Unlike his contemporaries, Newton made no pretence of painting from life: this eerily empty scene of faded Regency grandeur smacks of surveillance rather than observation. Newton was popularly known as ‘the Regent’s Canaletto’, but his theatrical vision of canalside London is sadly lacking in Venetian colour and fun.
Colour and fun return in the final room, which portrays a revivified Royal Academy looking about it with renewed confidence — to Europe in Frederick Gore’s belatedly Post-Impressionist ‘Near Soller, Majorca’, and to America in David Hockney’s ‘Double Study for “A Closer Grand Canyon”’. Coincidentally, the cow count drops to two — a couple of Friesians brushed into the foreground of ‘A Farmyard in Cumberland’ (c.1974) by Sheila Fell. What happened? The only form in which ruminants seem acceptable to contemporary collectors is when sawn in two and floating in a tank. Is this because of their poor green rating, or some deeper reason? This rummager in the subconscious of British landscape would like to know. A fertile theme, perhaps, for Opulence and Anxiety II.
Kate Whiteford’s landscape intervention Airfield 2007 runs concurrently in the grounds.
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