The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest collection of British art outside the UK. An impressive collection it is too, largely bequeathed by Paul Mellon of the American banking dynasty. He holidayed in England as a child before the first world war and, having developed a taste for ‘dappled tan cows in soft green fields’, began acquiring British works on natural history as a young man.
In this book, Elisabeth R. Fairman, a curator of rare books at Yale, has gathered images, largely from the collection, of all that the British countryside has to offer, recorded by artists and naturalists from the 16th century to the present day.
The sheer beauty of some of the watercolours, prints and paper-cuts is astounding. They make me long to sit for days in the Yale library and leaf through the other pages. And the book is flawlessly produced, right down to the pocket at the back to tuck your own cuttings in, and ribbon markers in Farrow & Ball hues. But I struggled with its strange structural device: an imagined ‘Field Guide to the British Countryside’ introduced by four essays. ‘Field Guide’ is a misnomer. The idea that a rambler would lace up their boots, deposit a Kendal mint cake in one pocket and this £40 hardback tome in the other and set off in the drizzle to identify buttercups is absurd.
Arranging the images by type does allow Fairman to show the ‘aesthetic kinship’ between, for example, the blackberries in the extraordinary Helmingham Herbal and Bestiary (c. 1500) and Rosaleen Wain’s etching of the same (1996). The problem is that this often shows up the contemporary work in an unflattering light. Some of it isn’t really up to much.
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