'Context' - A Blog
Would this painting of an old Ferguson tractor at work feel different were it to be a modern tractor, and if so, why?
The Meaning of a Figure in a Landscape
(Part 1 of 2)
05/02/2021
Should the people in our landscape paintings be from now or the past and should they confront or soothe us?
If the presence of people in a landscape is so dominant, how is the artist to depict them? Anyone who paints the countryside for any appreciable length of time will have learned to pay due regard as to how the figures of humans are placed in them. One of the attractions of many rural paintings is the sense of apparent timelessness in the scene. Even though any student of landscape history will probably suggest that the idea of a landscape remaining unchanged through time is a fictional construct, there is little doubt but that the sense of intransience is one of the immense and continuing draws of the genre.
To place a person in this type of painting always risks dispelling this notion. It almost always seats the painting within a certain historical timeframe. Often it is simply the clothes being worn that give this away, but the activities and accoutrements of the people do so too. How much more attractive to most would be an artwork with scythe-man in a white shirt, waistcoat and hat, sharpening his scythe, (perhaps with ceramic jug and lunch in tied kerchief adjacent) than the similar painting of a virtually identical landscape, but with a tractor driver changing the blades on his disc mower, behind a big New Holland tractor, clad in modern overalls and a characteristic baseball style cap (and to his side a thermos and plastic sandwich box!)?
Most, in fact I suspect nearly all, in mentally answering that will have veered towards the scythe-man. Were I, however, to change the tractor to a Little Grey Fergie, or an old Fordson, give the driver a good 1950’s rural garb (complete with tie and peaked tweed hat) and a lunch in a canvas bag with an ex-service water bottle, I think I could count on a few dissenters switching to favour this version.
It seems that we have a definite preference for a good dose of nostalgia when it comes to human presence in our rural images. This is no new phenomenon; any analysis of most of British landscape painting of the mid nineteenth century places would probably place it in the ‘Georgic’ tradition. The need to farm the land with ‘worthy toil’ was seen as an inevitable part of a stable, ordered and accepted agrarian tradition that stretched back to time immemorial. The people that occupy most of these paintings are largely hearty and well fed looking rustics, productively, and apparently fairly happily, engaged in wholesome and necessary rural labour.
Consider that these were painted at a time which faced recurring crises of dealing with unemployed and underemployed, impoverished, badly housed and chronically underfed rural poor. It seems astonishing that the artists of the time seem to have avoided this reality around them and instead populated their paintings with idyllic figures garnered from a golden nostalgic view of what (to anyone who had spent any time in the contemporary landscape, at least) must have already seemed like a better past age.
Over the time since, we have become more used to art which challenges our assumptions, confronts us with notions and facts about our present selves and our society which are uncomfortable. This kind of work is formidable and a potent force for positive change. It is the work of cutting edge comment and publicly funded art projects, aimed to stimulate conversation and debate, to be controversial.
This is not the only kind of art with value still though. Few of us would seek out such challenging pieces to hang in our houses. Does looking for a calming and beautiful rural view for one’s lounge imply that one is simply seeking escapism? Does non-confrontational and unchallenging in a work imply an emptiness of meaning? Are we mostly like those late Georgian and early Victorian folks hanging pictures of rural serenity in their drawing rooms while the social fabric of the countryside crumbled outside?
I would give a mix of yes’s and no’s to these questions. Yes, I think we do sometimes seek escapism in art and yes, I don’t think we are very different to the people of the mid nineteenth century; human nature really changes very little. But are these artistic longings simply escapism? Emphatically no. Does non-confrontational and unchallenging equate to emptiness of meaning? Absolutely not, and whilst human nature changes little, society does, so to equate the average person’s lounge of today with the bastion of entrenched wealth and societal position that was the preserve of the mid nineteenth century rich is an untenable comparison.
So, can I present the meaning and point of such art in a last easy glib paragraph? No. I have spent the better part of my lifetime grappling with the complexity of human relationships with land and I don’t have any simple answers, but next time I shall try an offer some thoughts as counterpoise to any assertion that the people in our rural paintings have to overtly challenge us for the art to have intrinsic value.
To place a person in this type of painting always risks dispelling this notion. It almost always seats the painting within a certain historical timeframe. Often it is simply the clothes being worn that give this away, but the activities and accoutrements of the people do so too. How much more attractive to most would be an artwork with scythe-man in a white shirt, waistcoat and hat, sharpening his scythe, (perhaps with ceramic jug and lunch in tied kerchief adjacent) than the similar painting of a virtually identical landscape, but with a tractor driver changing the blades on his disc mower, behind a big New Holland tractor, clad in modern overalls and a characteristic baseball style cap (and to his side a thermos and plastic sandwich box!)?
Most, in fact I suspect nearly all, in mentally answering that will have veered towards the scythe-man. Were I, however, to change the tractor to a Little Grey Fergie, or an old Fordson, give the driver a good 1950’s rural garb (complete with tie and peaked tweed hat) and a lunch in a canvas bag with an ex-service water bottle, I think I could count on a few dissenters switching to favour this version.
It seems that we have a definite preference for a good dose of nostalgia when it comes to human presence in our rural images. This is no new phenomenon; any analysis of most of British landscape painting of the mid nineteenth century places would probably place it in the ‘Georgic’ tradition. The need to farm the land with ‘worthy toil’ was seen as an inevitable part of a stable, ordered and accepted agrarian tradition that stretched back to time immemorial. The people that occupy most of these paintings are largely hearty and well fed looking rustics, productively, and apparently fairly happily, engaged in wholesome and necessary rural labour.
Consider that these were painted at a time which faced recurring crises of dealing with unemployed and underemployed, impoverished, badly housed and chronically underfed rural poor. It seems astonishing that the artists of the time seem to have avoided this reality around them and instead populated their paintings with idyllic figures garnered from a golden nostalgic view of what (to anyone who had spent any time in the contemporary landscape, at least) must have already seemed like a better past age.
Over the time since, we have become more used to art which challenges our assumptions, confronts us with notions and facts about our present selves and our society which are uncomfortable. This kind of work is formidable and a potent force for positive change. It is the work of cutting edge comment and publicly funded art projects, aimed to stimulate conversation and debate, to be controversial.
This is not the only kind of art with value still though. Few of us would seek out such challenging pieces to hang in our houses. Does looking for a calming and beautiful rural view for one’s lounge imply that one is simply seeking escapism? Does non-confrontational and unchallenging in a work imply an emptiness of meaning? Are we mostly like those late Georgian and early Victorian folks hanging pictures of rural serenity in their drawing rooms while the social fabric of the countryside crumbled outside?
I would give a mix of yes’s and no’s to these questions. Yes, I think we do sometimes seek escapism in art and yes, I don’t think we are very different to the people of the mid nineteenth century; human nature really changes very little. But are these artistic longings simply escapism? Emphatically no. Does non-confrontational and unchallenging equate to emptiness of meaning? Absolutely not, and whilst human nature changes little, society does, so to equate the average person’s lounge of today with the bastion of entrenched wealth and societal position that was the preserve of the mid nineteenth century rich is an untenable comparison.
So, can I present the meaning and point of such art in a last easy glib paragraph? No. I have spent the better part of my lifetime grappling with the complexity of human relationships with land and I don’t have any simple answers, but next time I shall try an offer some thoughts as counterpoise to any assertion that the people in our rural paintings have to overtly challenge us for the art to have intrinsic value.