RA Magazine Spring 2010

Issue Number: 106

A pastoral painter

Paul Sandby's paintings reflect the meeting of two British poetic traditions – the Arcadian idyll and the down-to-earth recording of country life, says Jenny Uglow

After the creation of ‘Great Britain’ in 1707 there was a drive on the part of writers, commentators and artists to create a distinctive culture suitable to a new nation, celebrating the land, and the landscape itself, and particularly drawing on Britain’s past, its ancient monuments, abbeys, castles and villages, rather than looking to the grandeurs of Paris or Rome.

As the eighteenth century progressed this mood intensified, as a wealthier ‘middling-class’ with more time on their hands became entranced by travel within their own nation, taking in stately homes and fine gardens (which often had their own guidebooks) as well as famous ruins and scenic landscapes like the Peak District. The 1770s and 80s saw a vogue for displaying British landscape and culture to admirers from abroad, as well as citizens at home. A prime example was the famous Frog Service, ordered from Josiah Wedgwood by Catherine the Great in 1773-74, a vast dinner service of almost 1,000 pieces. Each piece depicted a different picture of British life, from mansions and abbeys to waterwheels and mines. Paul Sandby’s views of Wales and his book of views of England, Scotland and Ireland, The Virtuosi’s Museum of 1778-81, fall into this vein. But his work also has a literary dimension, derived largely from poets in the generation before he was born in 1731, in tune with his nostalgic conservatism.

Sandby’s landscapes and paintings of great landed estates, such as View in Luton Park of c.1765 (right) also have poetic parallels, although the scenes are not poetic in the Romantic sense. He eschews the chasms and brooding intensity that appealed to the younger generation, like Joseph Wright of Derby, who was drawn to the ‘sublime’. Sandby’s models, displaying a characteristic classicism and English ‘reserve’, are the landscapes of Milton’s twin poems Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, published in 1645:

Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom’d high in tufted Trees.

The vision is that of a retreat sheltered from the bustle of the metropolis and the dangers of power: a cottage with gently curling smoke, set against meadows and woods with a stately home in the background. Poems such as John Dyer’s Grongar Hill (1726) were deliberately painterly, and contemporary critics noted how Dyer wrote of the colours of trees: ‘The gloomy Pine, the Poplar blue/The yellow Beech, the sable Yew’.

But this admired countryside offers no escapist idyll. The scene is also peopled and industrious like the landscape of Virgil’s Georgics, evoking the energy of British life as well as the pastoral beauty of its scenery. Thus down-to-earth, active scenes blend with high-flown philosophy, as seen in James Thomson’s The Seasons of 1730. This was by far the most influential poetic work of the time because it displayed the variety of nature as manifesting the power of God, yet also the work of the farmers as the year passed. Thomson’s mood is grander and more turbulent than Sandby’s. But both poet and artist are concerned with precision and with the life of the people in the landscape, as in Thomson’s sharp advice in Winter, published in 1726, which combines the swirling atmosphere of the snow storm with a contribution to a debate about sheep farming:

Now, Shepherds, to your helpless Charge be kind,
Baffle the raging Year, and fill their Pens
With Food at will; lodge them below the Storm,
And watch them strict.

However, in most mid-eighteenth-century landscape verse such concerns were subordinate to the beauty of the wider vista. The bountiful ‘prospect’, described in Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642), became a standard instruction to artists:

Low at his foot a spacious plain is plac’d
Between the mountain and the stream embrac’d:
Which shade and shelter from the Hill derives
While the kind river wealth and beauty gives;
And in the mixture of all these appears
Variety, which all the rest indears.

A century later, the notion of the prospect had become commonplace. Art critic Matthew Craske even suggests that in his views of Windsor Castle, Paul Sandby deliberately subverted the tradition by looking up at the castle from low viewpoints and peopling the battlements with flirtatious couples and dozing drunks. Sandby remained a master of the prospect nonetheless, adapting it subtly to please his patrons.

The ‘variety’ of scenery that Denham advocated in Cooper’s Hill included buildings, preferably those hallowed by time. In poetry these could conjure a nostalgic transience, as in Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747) where the ‘distant spires’ and ‘antique tow’rs’ evoke a careless youth doomed to succumb to adult ambition and greed.

More often the venerable buildings were employed to promote a more positive political, nationalistic message, displaying the country’s past glories, good leadership and prosperity. This tone is adopted by Sandby’s close associate William Mason, the Yorkshire clergyman, poet, satirist and garden designer. Mason edited his friend Gray’s works, and was an influential figure in forming ideas of the picturesque and Gothic. In 1761 he collaborated on Sandby’s only historical painting, the Welsh bard in the opening of Gray’s celebrated poem The Bard: A Pindaric Ode (1755-57). Sandby’s painting Roche Abbey, c.1770s also anticipated the mood of Mason’s four-volume poem The English Garden (1772-82). Here Mason expressed a firm preference for a ‘rude… yet an English whole’, a landscape adorned with Saxon and Norman remains, the abandoned abbeys with their broken arches and ivy-clad walls acting as reminders of Britain’s freedom from Rome.

In The English Garden, Mason appealed to the ‘sister Powers’ which endowed men with ‘Those magic seeds of Fancy, which produce/A Poet’s feeling, and a Painter’s eye’. In similar vein, Sandby’s brother Thomas linked the landscape painter and ornamental gardener: ‘their studies being chiefly directed to such objects as are noble, grand and picturesque: such that they endeavour to select, arrange and combine, so as to display, on their canvas, the most beautiful forms and effects of nature’.

In The Flower Garden at Nuneham Courtney (1777) Sandby depicts the garden, which was designed by Mason in 1771 with its classical monuments and mix of wild and garden flowers, as a delectable, melancholy retreat. But he also paid careful attention to particular trees, such as the oak and the beech, celebrating native wildness as opposed to ruthless ‘improvement’.

Sandby’s art is more complex than first impressions may suggest, a final parallel echoed in the now neglected eighteenth-century landscape poets. ‘The reader of The Seasons,’ wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shews him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses.’ The same might be said of Paul Sandby.

• The English Landscape: Art and Poetry evening lecture on 14 May is given by Sir Andrew Motion

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