Output details

The prospect far and wide: an eighteenth-century drawing of Langley Bush and Helpston’s unenclosed countryside

Context:

An illustrated monograph that presents a novel assessment of the English landscape genre.

Research resides within:

a closer analysis of the visual representation of England’s open and common field landscape through the English landscape painting tradition. It explores landscape before Parliamentary Enclosures eradicated form and habitats and proposes a new way of understanding the development of the genre. This work culminated in a Marc Fitch Fund award (September 2011) to assist with the reproduction of illustrations for this book.

Insights:

This book is the first full study of how British landscape painters resolutely continued to depict English landscape, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but also from contemporary poems and novels. The book recasts common land as a recurrent facet of English culture in the modern period, highlighting a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrating that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity. Its contribution to the history and the understanding of the development of the English Landscape Painting genre was recognised by the judges of the 2013 William M. B. Berger prize for British art history as a ‘most elegantly written book that calmly knocked many entrenched but erroneous notions about British landscape painting firmly on the head.’

The research was shared in a number of academic conferences and invited public talks between 2008 and 2012 (including a day school on Landscape and Enclosure at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education). Waites also has a dedicated blog in which he shares his work with wider audiences of interest.