Laura Gascoigne

Pastoral visions

Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy of Arts

issue 28 April 2007

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’.

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