Landscapes and seaviews

Landscape painting emerged as a distinct genre within British art in the late seventeenth century. Its roots lay in the topographical townscapes and country house portraits which celebrated prosperity and a settled social order in the wake of the Restoration of the monarchy. Most of these were painted by immigrant artists from the Netherlands like Jan Vosterman (1643-1699) who painted the earliest landscape painting in the collection of Guildhall Art Gallery, London from Greenwich Hill (1680). In the following century cultivated taste favoured the idealised classical landscapes of Claude and Gaspar Dughet and their English imitators. Interest in the wild and mountainous scenery of Britain was awoken with the cults of the Sublime and the Picturesque, but it was not until the early years of the nineteenth century that many painters turned to her peaceful pastoral farmlands.

In the first third of the nineteenth century more rural landscape subjects were painted than any other kind of picture. Their popularity with urban middle class patrons reflected a growing unease about the dehumanising aspects of life in the expanding cities and towns and a nostalgia for the apparently purer and more natural life of the countryside. These naturalistic landscapes were influenced by the Dutch seventeenth century paintings which could also be seen in English collections by the turn of the century.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the development of railways and steamships more people than ever before could venture abroad with relative ease and travel became a fashion that stimulated a demand for views abroad. Responding to a demand for pictorial souvenirs and feeding the interest of those unable to travel, one of the most successful in exploiting the market was David Roberts. He excelled in painting architecture, while fellow scenery painters Clarkson Stanfield and Edward William Cooke concentrated on British and continental coastal landscape scenery. Painting in the 1830s and 1840s was characterised by clear outlines, bright colours and meticulously rendered detail, a development which reached its climax with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who painted landscape studies and backgrounds on the spot with a painstaking attention to sharply lit microscopic detail.

From the 1870s many young painters dissatisfied with the teaching in the Royal Academy Schools were drawn to study on the Continent, among them Walter Osborne, Henry Scott Tuke and Henry Herbert La Thangue. Later they painted in rural communities in Brittany where primitive customs, unspoilt landscape and picturesque traditional costumes could still be found. When they returned to England they established similar colonies of artists in the Cornish fishing villages of Newlyn and St Ives, in Walberswick in Suffolk and elsewhere. In 1886 many were founder members of the New English Art Club, whose tenets included a commitment to painting out of doors. Their influence even more pervasive than that of the Pre-Raphaelites, the so-called British impressionists set the tone for landscape painting into the twentieth century.

The development of British impressionism coincided with the terrible agricultural depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The urban population of England had exceeded the rural one for the first time in 1851: fifty years later it was three times as large and agriculture represented only a fraction of the economy. The wistful and elegiac Mowing Bracken (1902) by La Thangue seems obliquely to acknowledge this passing away of the old order of country life.