Gainsborough, the Subtle Art of a Landscape Painter.

From late September to January (2011-2), the Holburne Museum in Bath mounted an exhibition of
landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). It was the first exhibition of this kind for fifty
years, according to the Museum. As such the collection has been splendidly presented, with an
informative essay/catalogue by Susan Sloman. Susan Sloman has also written the standard
monographon Gainsborough's career in Bath. The exhibition will move on to Compton Verney from
11 February to 10 June 2012.
Gainsborough enjoyed painting landscapes. He performed his portraits.
However, this was not because landscape painting was any less fashionable or lucrative Obviously,
the market preferred historical themes and portraits, under the cold stare of Denis Diderot.
However, the professional and amateur markets were busy with landscapes. Gainsboroughs
preference was psychological rather than pragmatic. For Gainsborough landscape painting was a
subjective form of aesthetic meditation. Portraiture entailed interaction. Pattern books stimulated
technique, such as that produced by Alexander Cozens, also a Bath inhabitant. Following him and
Cennino Cennini in Il Libro DellArte, Gainsborough often assembled models out of small rough
stones, or lumps of rock that could be laid out on a table. It is well-known that not all of
Gainsboroughs landscapes were painted from direct observation. Though the exhibition shows
drawings by Gainsborough which reveal his acute eye and witness to detail.

What is unique to Gainsborough is the sheer spontaneity and fluidity of his brushwork and his
faultlessly natural choice of colour. As such his role as one of the founders with Richard Wilson of
the British Landscape School is assured, though the European influence of Poussin and Dutch
Seventeenth Century painting is evident in both. As such the later achievements of John Crome,John
Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, and John Sell-Cotman all state their dependence on
Gainsborough. Jean-Baptiste Camille, Corot and the Barbizon school, especially and Diaz de la Pena,
too, owe an allegiance to Gainsboroughs remarkable combination of unprompted, yet thought through vision. From there a line can be drawn through the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
to Paul Nash and John Piper among Twentieth Century painters and David Hockney among
contemporaries.
According to John Ruskin in Modern Painters and Sir Kenneth Clark's Preface to Landscape into Art
landscape painting became the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant
art", that led us to be "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of
landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity" . Clarks account of landscapes
however, comes across as rather empty and generalised. His list of assumptions such as the
assimilation of descriptive symbolism, the desire to investigate nature, the wish for escape into the
fantastic in order to alleviate our dependence on nature and that old chestnut, the nostalgia for a
Golden Age are too clumsy to account for the achievement, even of the Romantic painters.
I argue for continuity between the tradition of landscape painting and what is dogmatically called
non-figurative painting. A recent exhibition of Arshile Gorkis paintings shows how the same qualities
of vehemence, sane coherence and atmosphere to be found in great landscape pictures can be found
in his so-called abstraction. Yet most contemporary criticism argues against this.
Modernist theory such as Greenbergs advocacy of the purity of the two-dimensional does not take
into account the relativity of the painterly medium that thrives on associations and allusions. Nor
does Jencks discussion of hesitant irony in William Wilkins Figures With a Landscape get us any
further in analysing the distilled ecstasy of great landscape art. Mere tongue-cheek playfulness and
differing levels of meaning cannot account for the fact that what is revived, even provisionally still
retains a continuity of meaning. In other words if the meaning was not there to be lost, it would not
be losable: if it were not losable, what then the dizzying fall?
That bottomless reduplication much urged by Rosalind Krauss, still depends upon an identity to be
first gained then lost. So too is the deceptively innovative idea of the gaze.You can look upon
Gainsboroughs Landscape with a View of a Distant Village(c.1750), which is the glory of the show, as
a text , or as the painters gaze representing a text, or as some backdrop to a theatrical or cinematic
production in which the socially-conscious Gainsborough is the director and/or the editor, as Lacan
would have us do. Yet what you look at, while indefinable, nonetheless still embodies an identity, or
rather shifting range of identity.
Laurence Binyon has written of this quality in his work on John Crome and John Sell Cottman.
For here there is no attempt to escape from the actual, no revolt; only the distillation of what is
loveliest in an actual scene, without effort or vehemence, accomplished with the quietness of power.
It seems, indeed, almost as if the scene had created itself upon the paper ; so unconscious, so lost in
its subject, has been the working of the artist's mind. The drawing, once seen, haunts the memory ;
it overflows with its own atmosphere ; it is scented with the dawn ; one hears the labourer's cry to
his team in the early stillness, in the shadow of the sleepy elms ; one feels all the charm of the "
sacred morning in the sanity of its beauty.

If we look at the picture we see a quietness that in the words of Laurence Binyon, has almost created
itself. The very liveliness of the human and animal figures in which cows and sheep react to a dog,
barking at a bird, while two almost biblical figures rest and converse, defines its still power. In their
haunting and limpid freshness, we do not taste the river and experience the mystic blueness of the
sky because this is what rivers and skies really mean to us. Rather out of a range of possible
meanings, or relative identities, we select those that come closest to what we want to taste and see.
Yet this is never a fixed identity. You can come to it again and again and see related identities, such
as those social realities discussed by Susan Sloman in the catalogue, but at no stage can it ever have
a defined aesthetic identity, which is what Romantic, Modernist and Post Modernist critics insist on,
even if it is to debunk it.

This does not mean the power to evoke landscape is indefinable. So long as we have any kind of art
we will not be struck dumb long. What we define can only ever be an attribute, not a description of
the genre. Some like Henri de Lubac would claim that the contemplation that utters and allows us to
consider art is a natural capacity for mysticism. Just because we cannot equal that mystical essence
does not mean this great plastic lyric of the English landscape and its tradition has no identity.
Sources:
Binyon, Laurence(1897) John Crome and John Sell Cotman, London, Seeley And Co. Limited, Great
Russell Street, New York : The Macmillan Company' 102.Clark, Sir Kenneth, (1949)Landscape into
Art John Murray , London, PrefaceDe Lubac, Henri ,Chrisliche Mystik in Begegnungmit den
Weltreligionem J.Sudbrack ed. Das Mysterium und die Mystik (1974) Available from
http://www.theologie-heute.de/MystikvorlesungI.pdf Downloaded 08/01/12Jencks, Charles, (1987)
The Post-Avant-Garde; Painting in the Eighties,London Academy Editions' 61Diderot, Denis(1997)
Diderot on Art ed. and tr. Goodman, J. and Crow, T. Vols 1and 2 Yale University Press, New Haven
and London.passimGreenberg, Clement, Modern and Postmodern, Arts Magazine 54 (1980)646Krauss, Rosalind (1985) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge
Mass. MIT PressOpp, Adolph Paul (1954) Alexander and John Robert Cozens, Cambridge, Mass.,
165-87;Sloman, Susan (2011), Gainsborough's Landscapes, London, Philip Wilson Publishers 14.99.
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