Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Lincoln
Common land in English painting 1700-1850
Context:
This fully illustrated monograph formed the culmination of other work submitted. The book received a Marc Fitch Fund award (£700 September 2011) to assist with the reproduction of illustrations for this book.
Research resides within the processes of:
the novel assessment of the English landscape genre via a material as a visual indication of what England’s open and common field landscape looked like before the later Parliamentary Enclosures eradicated this type of landscape and habitat; proposing a new way of understanding the development of the English landscape painting tradition.
Insights:
The book is a pioneering survey of the artistic representation of common land in England, c.1700 to 1850. Despite the fact that this type of landscape was frequently viewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, 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 conferences and invited talks between 2005 and 2012, and at a day school on Landscape and Enclosure at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, May 2008.
