The Allure of Lodore: Painting Sensation as well as Scenery

Jessica Fay on 30/09/2024

by William C. Snyder

Created at Lodore Falls in the Lake District in 1777, Thomas Hearne’s Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall (Figure 1) is a work that resists the usual categorizations of late eighteenth-century landscape painting. A scene in pen-and-wash, it allows us to glimpse an early model of English visual artists embracing elements of native landscape on its own terms.

In executing this image, Hearne discounted a Claudean approach, eschewing imaginary persons occupying wistful atmospheres, or pastoral figures roaming beneath relics of architecture. And, while the painting contains some picturesque elements––a rugged scene mixing beautiful and sublime–– Hearne avoided placing a frame around the view, disqualifying it as a “prospect” favoured by contemporaries William Gilpin and Uvedale Price.

Instead, Hearne requires of us a fluency of gazing: to perceive a location where nature is active instead of static, to discern his own friends in the exercise of capturing a wilderness within which they are actors, and to behold an experiment in conveying atmosphere. Yet even as it edges toward such “romantic” qualities, the painting does not aspire to the naturalism, chromatic intensity or imaginative power found in the next generation of British painters, a number of whom paid homage to Lodore Falls in later decades (including Constable, Turner, Ibbetson, Towne, de Loutherberg, Sunderland and Girtin).

Figure 1. Thomas Hearne, *Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall, 1777,* pen and wash drawing, 41 x 28.5 cm. Digital image courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

Lodore Falls first gained notoriety in the mid-eighteenth century, via descriptions offered by writers Thomas Gray, John Dalton and John Brown, whose verbal accounts from the 1750s and 1760s were poetic and pictorial. In his 1769 touring journal Gray depicted “Lodoor” Falls as a stream “nobly broken, leaping from rock to rock, & foaming with fury” . . . from a height “about 200 feet” with a “towering crag, that spired up to equal, if not overtop, the neighbouring cliffs” with the surrounding area consisting of a “rounder broader projecting hill shag’d with wood & illumined by the sun, wch glanced sideways on the upper part of the cataract”. These impressions were included in a collection of Gray’s works, edited by William Mason, in 1775.

Joseph Farington (1747-1821), an understudy to Richard Wilson (1714-1782), appears to have been struck by Gray’s exalting rhetoric. According to John Murray, Farington traveled to Keswick in 1775 proposing to illustrate Gray’s views, but that plan was not realized. Nevertheless, Farington was able to trek through parts of the Lakes during that autumn and the following summer, explorations which provided familiarity with topographical features, allowing him to guide Hearne and Beaumont the next year.

Farington, Hearne and Beaumont all shared some interest in non-idealized landscapes. Each had previously traveled to the west and north of England and to Scotland––where terrain was wilder, more dramatic or more surprising than the gracious plains and hills of Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, or Worcestershire. At Derwentwater they came to realize that familiar or academic approaches to image-making needed expansion; sublime panoramas and the capricious weather and modulating atmospheres of the mountainous lakes urged all three artists to enlarge their vision. For a few weeks in August of 1777 the men traveled to the North Lakes to indulge their desire to paint pure landscapes together, on location, drawing upon each other’s technical and academic skills as well as upon one another’s perspectives and approaches.

The plan to work around Derwentwater probably arose from Farington’s standing desire to pictorialize Gray’s tour. Taking into account dates given on his sketches, we might infer that Farington took three tours in 1777: working in and around Grasmere and Keswick in June, heading to Carlisle to paint Corby Castle in July, and tracing through the northern Lakes from mid-August to mid-September.(Sketches and drawings indicate that this third outing took him from Cockermouth on 14 August and back to Keswick by 10 September. Dates affixed to pencil sketches of High Crag and Gatesgarth suggest that after the stay at Lodore his itinerary followed Honister Pass, ending at Cockermouth, where he produced a sketch of the northwest view of the castle).

The Low Door Hotel, situated at the entrance to the Borrowdale Valley, served as a pied-à-terre for the three artists. This location provided vistas that could be enjoyed from Derwentwater’s southern shoreline. The marsh in front of the hotel supplies choice views of Skiddaw, six miles to the north, looming above Keswick with the breast of the Lake in the foreground. A nearby pier makes access to other points on the Lake possible, and images from these locations were produced by these painters as well as by many others in later years. Today, lower Lodore Falls is actually within hotel property, an un-demanding ten-minute climb on foot, about twenty minutes with equipment.

On 27 August the three painters, along with a footman and a dog, bundled materials of composition and climbed a path alongside the cascade of boulders to their right. A Farington pencil sketch includes the script “Lodore Cottage from the Waterfall” in the lower left corner. On the back is “27 8 1777”. This artifact is likely Farington’s view in the Hearne canvas. (See Figure 2.)

‘An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall.’

Figure 2. Joseph Farington, Lodore Cottage from the waterfall, 27 8 1777. Enhanced digital image, The Wordsworth Trust.

Before the rocky channel got too steep, they unpacked and began to set up. An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall. They secured two easels on top of large boulders. Hearne, the antiquarian and architectural draughtsman so familiar with composing from a distance, found a spot about eighty feet away, under a small clearing beneath a coppice of trees. On the same plane as his mates, with the falls tumbling aside a 35-foot limestone wall, he positioned to record his colleagues situated against the impressive backdrop, as they went about the unusual action of sketching in ink, outdoors, from an atypical point of view, surrounded by movement and moisture.

Hearne had been comfortable working outdoors from his years of rendering buildings. But the scene at Lodore Falls presented a pure landscape, and was less subject to conceptual control than a house or ruined abbey. So the painter nodded to a few familiar techniques of the continental picturesque tradition. The appearance of figures below an imposing rock façade with rugged features is a consistent idiom in the work of Salvator Rosa, Italian master of sublime landscapes and an influence on English nature painters in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Also, terrestrial elements—the canopy of trees at the top, and the array of boulders below—hint at a frame for the scene, a pattern from Italian and Dutch landscapes introduced by Wilson to English places.

Yet Hearne’s effort, as well as the initiative of Beaumont and Farington, crosses boundaries into entirely new territory. First, the figures are not only real, but known by the artist. Hearne is, for the era, surprisingly personal as he breaks from his training as an objective historian and provides a kind of visual diary entry. And, while picturesque or antiquarian painting typically includes animals, peasants, or children, they tend to be anonymous reference points who serve to convey a sense of proportion. Here Hearne names the performers, divulges clues about sensibility and motive, and implies his own participation by capturing the same subject as his colleagues. He punctures the standard screen of seeing the world, of presenting the view as “out there”.

With a rigid neo-classical frame elided, and with no long view or vista, Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall conveys a sense of enclosure, if not intimacy––between man and nature, and among the painters.Without a horizon, the margin between subject and observer is reduced, as Hearne refuses to artificially position trees or rocks to frame the figures. Beaumont and Farington are affiliated with the scene that they are involved in capturing—artists as subjects––woven into the larger visual web. Enveloped in the waterfall, their figures do not command immediate attention; we are prompted by the title to seek for them—and then to enter into the image, to assemble it ourselves.Hearne captures a moment in time integrating real subjects, natural elements, and local atmosphere, thus separating from historical or mythological landscapes which transport us to a different era, far removed from current life and conditions. Here we are in the present day viewing men at work at a specific time in a known place.

The paraphernalia of the artists––the brushes, umbrellas and tripods–– insinuate shapes found elsewhere in the painting: the sloping tops of boulders, or the trunks and branches of some of the trees. Also, seeming to borrow from Rosa, Hearne takes license to accentuate the rock wall, bending it toward the artists for dramatic effect, as the axis of the actual slab is more vertical in proximity to the stream. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Author’s photograph of rock face, Lodore Falls, October 2016.

The placement of the two artists––not just in proximity to the water, but inside the rock channel of the falls—is striking for the time. The germ of the idea to attempt composing from such a position may never be known, but Beaumont and Farington might have been seeking immediacy, to paint sensation as well as scenery. In any case, they were undertaking quite a challenge. At Lodore Falls, the set-up of equipment required of oil painting (involving larger canvases than pads or sketchbooks) would have been physically difficult. The unevenness of the boulders and the variation of their size, in addition to the wetted surfaces and slippery moss, required extensive preparation before any brush touched canvas.

To navigate this problem, the men likely customized their supports, scanning the ravine’s bed for small sandy pods flat enough to allow sturdy footholds. Still, the painting presents the canvases as a bit askew; the ruggedness of the landscape is complemented by the ruggedness of the process, which invites another potential interpretation: was the sight of his fellows climbing over slick rocks to install two easels so unique that Hearne decided that such an act of human enterprise was just as worthy of portrayal as the falls? In any case, Hearne shows the challenges involved in painting landscapes on-site, revealing to us that era’s tools of the trade, from the mountings to the multiple umbrellas to the mahlsticks. (See Figure 4.)

‘…a kind of visual diary entry’

Figure 4. Thomas Hearne, Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall, detail.

Hearne’s preliminary and larger sketch for this tableau lays out another interesting subplot in the Lodore story. A pencil drawing (17.8 x 19 cm) (Figure 5) archived in the Wordsworth Trust adds nuance to the finished work. Most notably, the preliminary sketch includes facial expressions of two of the men, gazes of satisfaction or pleasure. The closest figure, likely Sir George Beaumont (Figures 6 and 7), appears to be looking at the canvas with serene approval while he holds a brush; the standing figure, probably Beaumont’s attendant, with hands in pocket, casually admires the waterfall. The expression of the middle figure is not apparent, but the curve of the chin suggests Farington, who had a full, round face. The pencil rendition includes a dog, who is looking at Hearne, providing a point of entry into the scene for the viewer, and disrupting any sense of picturesque distance. All four figures are interconnected, yet all are looking in different directions.

Figure 5. Thomas Hearne, *Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall,* pencil sketch, 17.8 x 19 cm, the Wordsworth Trust.

Figure 6. Enlarged detail from pencil sketch.

The final work switches the positions of Beaumont and Farington, and obscures their expressions. The attendant is shown as sitting and is darkened, nearly lost in the composition. The dog has been erased. Different too are the posts for the easels (less rugged in the painting) and Farington’s easel has two intersecting spires with no apparent footing.

As Hearne worked the tableau into the final, larger canvas, he traded the intimate detail of the figures for the impact of boulders, slab, and waterfall. The sketch is realistic; the painting is artistic. The sketch betrays the pleasure and contentment of connections—to nature and to art, even of a brotherhood of picture-making. The painting zooms out to a view that allows natural elements—and some sense of sublimity—to prevail.

Nevertheless, the two versions of the men at their canvases allow two perspectives of an experiment in process. The three artists were outside their usual spheres, and certainly beyond the compass of their masters. Castles, priories, goddesses, shepherds, estates, engravers and a picturesque frame were not in play. Instead, the focus is on flesh-and-blood British gentlemen enjoying an actual British place in a specific moment of time. John Constable, who eventually became good friends with Sir George, might have titled this work “Waterfall: Noon.”

Finally, while Hearne’s execution is remarkable enough, his point of view is rare for the time. Standing on a small plateau, a twenty-first century visitor to the Falls can approximate Hearne’s position and gaze upon the disheveled boulders that upheld Beaumont, Farington and their easels, imagine the two painters putting pencil to palette after studying the cascade, and perhaps occasionally glancing back at Hearne, thinking that the Falls were his subject, little realizing that they were subjects themselves, part of the scene, being immortalized.

Somewhere during their long friendship, Hearne made a gift of his Lodore watercolour to Sir George, and, except for occasional exhibition, the canvas evidently was in the Beaumont estate until obtained by the Wordsworth Trust in 1984.

If it is accurate to say that the “Lakers” of the Romantic age found qualities in Cumberland and Westmoreland that were already inside themselves, we should see Farington, Hearne and Beaumont as belonging to an earlier sensibility, teasing out a new kind of art in an elemental way––where classical vision and technical training were tentatively fused with a varied and spectacular topography. In the Lakes, and especially at Derwentwater, the three men began to extend the boundaries of their academic preparation so that they could do justice to Cumbria’s unique terrain, atmosphere, and history. The vicissitudes of the Lakes provoked their imaginations, summoning them to dabble with effects, perspectives, techniques and moods which presaged their later works, and which would become standard in the painting of the next generation.

Figure 7. Joshua Reynolds, *Sir G. Beaumont, Baronet,* 1807, National Portrait Gallery

William C Snyder is an independent Romantics scholar based in Pennsylvania

Pioneers of Local Thinking: Polly Atkin

Jessica Fay on 09/09/2024

“From towers of joy to sickroom gardens: revisiting Dorothy Wordsworth’s dwelling-places of the mind”

At the confluence of nature-writing, life-writing, and disability studies, Atkin’s work is underpinned by a rich understanding of the Lake District and expertise in Romantic literature.

Atkin is the author of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), a ground-breaking biography that focuses on the mental and physical illness that Dorothy Wordsworth suffered in the final decades of her life.

Atkin’s most recent book, Some of Us Just Fall: on Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023) is a profound reflection on the experience of inhabiting a body and a place in the context of disability and illness. She is also the author of poetry collections including Much With Body (2021), Basic Nest Architecture (2017), and Shadow Dispatches (2013), as well as works of literary criticism, biography, and short form non-fiction.

Atkin introduces her subject here:

“This talk will take a wander through places both of the earth and the mind as Dorothy experienced them, with a focus on the parallels between her acute sensory experience of material place, and her ability to conjure places from her imagination, both remembered and created. I trace her ability to inhabit both real and unreal places from the dream cottages she imagined as a unsettled young woman without a home of her own, to the gardens she brought into her sickroom when she was housebound later in life. During those housebound years, writing and reciting poetry becomes a way of both reigniting memories, and bringing the natural world into her mind and her room, even when she cannot leave her bed. She brings the outside in, literally, and in memory and poetry. In this talk I bring those late imaginative travels back into parallel with her youthful attempts to ‘build castles’ or ’tower(s) of joy’ as she dreamt of a home in which happiness might arise from ideal company, ‘retirement and rural quiet’. In doing so, I question whether everything we value about her place-writing – her intense attention to the intricacies and particularities of place – is what enables her to travel so satisfactorily through the many mansion of her mind too.”

Arts of Place/Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Weinrebe Lecture 2024

Alexandra Harris on 26/04/2024

Fiona Stafford

‘Time and Tide: Lives and Landscapes’

Tuesday 18 June 2024, 5pm, University of Birmingham

Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own.

We were delighted to welcome Fiona Stafford, FBA, Professor of English at the University of Oxford, scholar of Romantic literature, and author of bestselling books on our relationships to the natural world and our local surroundings.

‘Landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes – seemingly empty spaces often turn out to be full of life and hidden lives. A solitary walk is a chance to listen to waves or leaves, to catch sight of birds and wildlife, to sense the people who once lived and worked there. Writing the long, long life of landscape means attending to what seems odd or out of place, to unexpected openings into the past. A bridge from nowhere to nowhere, an old oak in a birchwood, a red squirrel, a half-submerged church, an echoing sea cave, or an enigmatic placename – cracks in the present, opening the way into other times and other lives.’

Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820

Sean Ketteringham on 16/02/2024

Arts of Place is excited to introduce our new project…

‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’ is a two-year project supported by the British Academy. Over the course of the 2023-24 academic year, we will present a series of seminars to consider how a range of artists and writers – from William Cowper to William Green of Ambleside, and from the Smiths of Chichester to George Crabbe – departed from eighteenth-century conventions of literary and pictorial representation. Together, they reimagined how art and literature can shape, and be shaped by, local identity and the environment.

George Smith (1714–1776), A Winter Landscape, c.1770, Yale Center for British Art

The project aims to provide new insights into the growth of localism in poetry and painting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We will investigate some of the ways in which Dutch and Flemish aesthetics influenced those working in provincial areas of Great Britain. Asking how European culture permeated British towns and villages, we’ll look at the precedents set by Rubens, Rembrandt, van Ruisdael, and Hobbema (amongst others), and how these contributed to the development of new forms and artistic methods in culturally and geographically peripheral parts of Britain.

Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative, and collaborative approach, we will work between text, image, geography, natural history, and the social and philosophical changes of the Romantic period. We want to consider the importance of this cultural history of localism as we experience a resurgence of regionality today, through governmental policy, in environmental activism, through experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a burgeoning new school of nature writing. What do the place-writers and artists working today make of their Romantic roots?

We hope many of you will join us to think through this subject and share your insight and experience.

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), Ruined House, 1807-1810, Yale Center for British Art

“To the Lakes!”: Local artistic perspectives

Sean Ketteringham on 16/02/2024

with guest speaker Jeff Cowton MBE, Principal Curator & Head of Learning at the Wordsworth Trust

Monday 20 May with Jessica Fay in response and conversation.

On 20 May, Jeff Cowton joined us to discuss the Wordsworth Trust’s exhibition ‘To the Lakes!’, a study of how the Lake District attracted outside tourists and artists from around 1750 onwards, and how this tourism has shaped both the art it produced and the place at its centre. As Jeff makes clear, the work of visiting artists taking picturesque tours of the area was partly shaped by local writers and artists. Jeff focused on the work of two artists: William Green of Ambleside and Joseph Wilkinson. He explored their challenge to the pictorial conventions surrounding landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and their engagement with the emergent tourism industry.

Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for some highlights.

Introducing his latest exhibition, Jeff invoked the finest poet of our age: yes, Taylor Swift of course, who sings ‘Take me to the lakes’. Unfortunately, this is followed by the line ‘where the poets went to die’. Jeff set out to chart more cheery and perhaps more lyrically nuanced territory. He turned our attention to tourists of the past and the present and how they have made the Lake District what it is today.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s lives at Dove Cottage were shaped by tourism, as William writes in ‘The Brothers’:

These Tourists, heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along,
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as the summer lasted: some, as wise,
Perched on the forehead of a jutting crag,
Pencil in hand and book upon the knee,
Will look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour’s corn.

Jeff turned first to Joseph Wilkinson (b. 1763), a Carlisle-born deacon who lived in Ormathwaite Hall north of Keswick. He left the lakes in 1803 to live in Norfolk but not before creating a substantial volume of landscape prints of Northern Scenery, with a title page created by William Marshall Craig featuring labouring figures in the landscape (a rarity within the landscape conventions of the day). Wordsworth was enlisted to write an introduction to Wilkinson’s, and he later voiced his embarrassment that the landscape would not meet the exacting standards of his patron Sir George Beaumont. Jeff expertly guided us through the ‘holy grail of Joseph Wilkinson studies’: a fascinating progression from preparatory drawing to watercolour and three prints with various levels of colour added.

Next Jeff turned to William Green (b. 1760) who trained in Manchester and later moved to Ambleside to create a prolific career as a landscape draughtsman and printmaker. Although Green was evidently conscious of the conventions of the picturesque, he also sought to depict a faithful record of landscape and architectural features in Ambleside and its area. Jeff highlights this tension between the pictorial and the practical by presenting us with an extract of an account of a tourist, Green, and his daughter discussing Stockghyll Force:

‘See now,’ observed Mr. G. ‘that tree shuts out the prettiest part of the cascade, while there wants one to hide the deformity of that other bank; be-side, that wood on the declivity of the other hill, which threw so fine a gloom over the whole glen, is now vanishing beneath the woodman’s axe; and a certain degree of poverty will be the natural consequence.’ ‘You will excuse,’ said Miss Green ‘my father’s enthusiasm for his darling art. He knows no world, but that in which a painter lives. Trees, with him, have no other use but that of giving softness and effect to a picture. The meadows were created for foregrounds and the hills were designed for distances. Rivers only roll along to brighten up the landscape; and cattle graze only to give life to his drawings. When any thing, therefore, is out of place, in a picturesque point of view, it excites his criticism, notwithstanding its utility in other respects.’

Jeff compared this to Thomas Gray’s notorious description of Grasmere life in 1763 where ‘all is rusticity and happy poverty’ and ended by sharing with those us in the room a small collection of prints produced by Green in the 1790s.

William Green (1760-1823), View of Windermere and Belle Isle, pencil and watercolour, Eton College

‘Seeds, to our eye invisible’:

Alexandra Harris on 11/01/2024

with guest speaker Dr James Bainbridge (Liverpool)

Monday 22 January, with Jessica Fay in response and conversation.

Botany was a key interest of the poet George Crabbe. “Give me a wild, wide Fen, in a foggy day,” he wrote, “and every botanist [is] an Adam who explores and names the creatures he meets with.” Between the publication of The Newspaper in 1785 and the 1807 Poems, much of his writing focused on the production of new botanical works. But this was a period of great change for English botany, and whilst Crabbe made use of competing Systems to arrange the natural world as he observed it, he was also drawn to the disorderly fringes of the science – things that were difficult to classify.

In January 2024, James Bainbridge joined us to examine the ways botany shaped Crabbe’s poetry, from the minuteness of detail in his description, to the study of distinction between individual subjects. James is a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He teaches and researches in eighteenth and twentieth-century literature with a particular interest in the influence of theology and natural sciences on the literature of the long-eighteenth century. He is currently writing a biography of the poet A.S.J. Tessimond and publishes regularly on Crabbe.

Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for some highlights.

Why do so few people read Crabbe today? By way of introduction, James explained why this is not a new question. Though he counted Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Ivan Turgunev, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell amongst his admirers, Crabb quickly fell out of favour in the 19th century:

“What the novel does in the nineteenth century takes its seeds in what Crabbe is doing in poetry, and partly because he was writing in poetry, he quickly went out of fashion”

Against, Virginia Woolf’s alignment of Crabbe with weeds, James suggested that

“On the whole, Crabbe tends to describe the mallow and the bugloss, not because he thinks of them as weeds, but rather because he thinks of them as native species. That word native is used extensively in his writing to think about place, to think about people, to think about plants. These plants aren’t described by their not belonging, but rather the reverse. Crabbe is drawn to them because they belong to the specific places he describes.”

Discussing The Borough (1810), James presented an astonishing case for how Crabbe deployed a taxonomical arrangement to articulate similarities and differences, order and disorder, amongst his characters, places, and environments:

“The emphasis on locality in these works indicates an almost proto-ecological interest in nature which appears even more prominent in a work he proposed to write on trefoils. In this he declared an ambition to give ‘a narration of the progressive Vegetation of the spot it grows on, etc. etc. etc’; the emphasis clearly placed on the way that habitats change through successions of plant life.”

James ultimately argued that in The Borough

“Crabbe show the relationship between botany and place. There is offered a particular bed that fits the seed. He considers how over time a place may change due to the succession of plants which dwell there. And it is this level of narrative which he felt was lacking from simple taxonomic arrangement, and why in both his botany and poetry he moved towards a more ecological approach. Crabbe botanical interests, far from being mere adornments to the poetry, are integral to his narrative and thematic development. His descriptions of plants and landscapes are not just backdrop but they are interwoven with the human stories that he tells.”

Cotman, Aubrey, and the Neglected Places

Sean Ketteringham on 26/10/2023

with guest speaker Prof. Peter Davidson (Oxford)

Monday 27 November

In November 2023, for the first research seminar of our new project ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’, we welcomed Prof. Peter Davidson to Birmingham for a discussion of John Sell Cotman and John Aubrey. Peter is Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Curator of the Campion Hall Collection in Oxford. He has authored monographs on the verse of Richard Fanshawe and Robert Southwell, as well a trio of acclaimed texts on landscape art: The Idea of North (2005), Distance and Memory (2013) and a cultural history of twilight The Last of the Light (2015).

Tracing a rich and rangy seam of placethinking, Peter discussed Aubrey’s drawings of his own house (made in 1670 prior to his permanent departure from the area), particularly his set of views of undramatic slopes and ends of fields. These are places which carry the same all-but-secret autobiographical meaning as the views of underbrush and shadowed streams which John Sell Cotman made in the course of his northern tour in 1805. Peter cast back through these English expressions of place to the wider context of Dutch paintings of ordinary time in ordinary corners, and forward to consider their qualities in relation to Wordsworthian romanticism.

Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for a summary.

We were the lucky passengers on Peter’s breath-taking journey through the English countryside, to Aberdeen, then Leiden and the Low Countries, followed by a foray into the Claudian scenes of the Grand tour, and a return to Aubery’s locality in the home counties. Through these composite views Peter shared his account of

“how we see landscape starting through that curious bringing together of north and south”.

On Aubrey’s book of drawings created with the use of a perspective machine in around 1669, Peter noted that they are ‘Place-time-weather specific, mostly dated as late April evenings’. This form of landscape, intensely personal responses to his immediate surroundings, appears as if from nowhere: the sources from which Aubrey could have learned this mode of representing landscape are limited to a very limited number of Dutch prints:

“he’s looking for a way of talking about the place and what it meant to him […] aesthetically there is no precedent”

Peter went on to describe how Aubrey suffered a ‘grievously interrupted education’ due to the Civil War, and he reads these drawings in light of Aubrey’s wistful longing for continuity and his intellectual preoccupation with archaeology, deep time and comparative anthropology, then in vogue amongst his Oxford circle.

Turning next to the dialogue-in-landscape between the landscapists of the Dutch Golden Age and the Norwich School of watercolourists, Peter’s unique way of seeing offers a stream of revelations: we catch Cotman red handed borrowing from Vermeer’s textural attention of brick, pointing, and the flaking render of buildings; we see a visual rhyme between Cotman’s Crambe Beck Bridge (1804) and the rhymical sunlit expanses of Gerrit Berckheyde’s The Golden Bend in the Heerengracht (1671); and we find John Crome joining ‘his master’ Hobbema in newfound uses of water to articulate the local specificity of light and shadow.

Peter ends on the absence of a conclusion. But through these endlessly allusive and deeply felt connections he comes full circle to his thesis of picturing place as an autobiographical tool. Looking with Cotman at a forgotten, formally irresolvable slip of land, On the Greta. he guides us to a moving understanding of how landscape gave shape, colour, and form to lives in the long eighteenth century.

Arts of Place/OCLW Annual Lecture 2023: Alexandra Walsham

Alexandra Harris on 21/02/2023

‘Writing the Generations: Time, Place, and Family Memory in Early Modern England’

Wednesday 26 April, 5pm, The University of Birmingham

“England’s long Reformation was, in multiple respects, a family affair; and indeed, a family quarrel”

We were delighted in 2023 to welcome one of the leading historians of our times: Alexandra Walsham, CBE, FBA, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Her book The Reformation of the Landscape, well-thumbed on many Arts of Place bookshelves, shaped understandings of how the landscape was perceived in early modern Britain when layers of Pagan and Catholic belief and culture were written over by waves of Protestant reform. Alexandra’s new book, Generations, is out this spring, and brings a wealth of evidence from local and family archives to questions of generational identity, belief, sense of time and sense of place.

Listen to Alexandra’s extraordinary lecture below:

Read on for some highlights from the lecture.

“The generation, understood as both a social cohort and a biological unit, is a neglected site of life-writing and record-keeping. This lecture seeks to explore the significance of families of blood and faith in the preservation of the past and in the creation of legacies for posterity. By focusing on individuals and communities who derived their identities from a shared location in time, it offers a fresh perspective on the intersection between the arts of memory and the arts of place in early modern England.”

Alexandra sketches out a foundational question: what is a generation? In religious early modern England, she continues, generation “denoted origin and pedigree, community, history, chronology and eternity”. Generations were a way to plot genealogy and ancestry; they signalled “a place of abode in the fabric of time”, as well as being “singularly relevant to the story of Christianity”.

Treating the generation as a site of memory, Alexandra lecture leads us on a journey through a rich collection of ars memoriae, considering how personal texts and artefacts construct places in which the living come into contact with generations past. We are treated to the lineages traced in family bibles—personal transcriptions and scribbles demonstrative both of fecundity and decline. We are brought to engraved memorial objects; to heirlooms passed down or gone astray; and to graffiti scratched into walls. All demonstrate the exceptional biographical capacity of such objects, as well as illustrating the importance of the generation to early modern culture.

Alexandra leaves us with a poignant reminder of the strange lives of the objects and texts discussed, and invites us to consider their place within the histories of both a private and public England:

“Ironically, the presence of the manuscripts, books and objects discussed in local and national archives, libraries and museums, indicates the breaking of the generational chain that ensured their preservation down the centuries. However, it also represents their transformation into forms of public patrimony. This is sometimes a consequence of the fact that they have been detached from their original contexts, passed into the hands of collectors, and gradually shed their status as treasured possessions and talismans of genealogical memory. But sometimes it indexes the desire of individual families to find a more secure place of safekeeping, or to make these relics of their personal histories into the resources for the wider community. For all those discovered in dusty boxes, or rescued from attics festooned with dirty cobwebs, others have been lost or still remain in private hands”.

Image: William Brooke, 10^th Baron Cobham and his Family, Master of the Countess of Warwick, 1567

Land and Labour in Literary History

Alexandra Harris on 21/02/2023

Monday 6 March, UoB Arts Building 103 (Constance Naden Room)

with guest speaker Paddy Bullard

Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Paddy Bullard to Birmingham for discussion and reflections on the links between land and labour in literary history. In the 50th anniversary year of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Paddy will reflect on why paying serious attention to rural life should still be central to understanding culture.

Paddy is the editor of A History of English Georgic Writing, a major book about a ‘vital green force in literary history’, available now and online here (with library log-on). He has written widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary culture, book history, and politics as well as working closely with the Museum of English Rural Life and developing pioneering projects on craft and manual skills.

There’ll be responses from UoB staff and students and open conversation over a glass of wine.

Between the Kingdoms of Sleep and Waking

Jessica Fay on 10/10/2022

By Hannah Christopher (BA English Literature, University of Birmingham)

I am surprised to have woken up in the dark. In my mind, September feels like it should be clutching onto summer more than it has. My weather app informs me that the sun will rise whilst I am underground, screeching through the rabbit warren of tunnels that link London Bridge to Euston. Although I never usually rise with the sun, I want to see it this time and the thought of missing its first appearance is disappointing.

It is 6am but the tube is far from empty. Next to me there is a traveller with matching coral suitcases and opposite me a commuter with hair still swirled upwards by recent contact with a pillow. To my right, four lads are shouting and laughing at alarm clock volume, their drunk conversation is surreal and cyclical, sips of phrases pass between them, echoed and repeated. Some of us have slept, others will soon shut the curtains on the sunlight and sleep through the day. For now, we shuttle under the dark city together. I think about how strange the tube is, necessity or desire has united us to this mobile waiting room before we are called out to our real destinations. I think about trains, the infrastructure which supports these tunnels and our dependence on these technologies, mechanical and digital, which enable us to live between places, ignoring nature’s rhythms: long distances are contracted by transport, night and day blurred by electric light, hot and cold levelled by air conditioning, the internet dividing friends between embodied and online experiences. As I emerge from the tube station and turn into the rail station, I am strangely relieved that it was a cloudy sunrise, I feel I have missed nothing. I face away from the dawn and take a picture of the glowing underground sign instead.

Sunrise at Euston Station

My destination is the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for the WomenTalkPlace symposium Talking Place. There are five panels throughout the day, aiming to facilitate conversations between contemporary place writers. The panels on place memoirs, novels, writing about places as magical experiences, and writing politically through landscape consider different writers’ methods and reasons for engaging with places in literary ways. Throughout the day, what came across most strongly, is that there are many ways to exist in a place; no approach to place is quite the same and many approaches combine seemingly opposite narratives of natural and digital, past and present, personal and geological, fiction and non-fiction.

Liptrot’s memoir responds to the complexity of navigating a digital and natural world simultaneously

In the first panel Amy Liptrot read from her Berlin memoir, The Instant. The chapter documents how she embarks on a series of excursions to traffic islands around Berlin with a new lover. The chapter drifts between romantic anecdotes of hands held and emails exchanged, before washing up on these traffic islands every so often; each island has a ‘mission report’, narrated like a Springwatch segment. The digital journey threads through the natural, a theme which runs throughout the book. Liptrot names the chapters after extended metaphors, many of them synthesising the technological and the natural: ‘a google maps tour of the heart’, ‘traffic islands’, ‘digital archaeology’. Liptrot’s memoir responds to the complexity of navigating a digital and natural world simultaneously which is reflected in the way that she writes.

Later, in a panel discussing magic and connections, Jeff Young’s reading from Ghost Town took us through the streets of Liverpool, unlocking stories from the city’s past by exploring the marks on the landscape that stories have left behind. Young describes the visibility of the past in a present landscape, making this vibrant city simultaneously a kind of Ghost Town. His memoir combines layers of civic history as well as his own story; in doing so, he writes himself into this landscape. He receives emails from readers who identify with his story, saying things like ‘you have written my childhood’. There is a continual repositioning of whose story is the story of this aggregate place which spans both distance and time.

Another memoir writer, Nicola Chester, discussed her new book On Gallows Down as part of a panel about ‘belonging’. Chester’s book claims to be a ‘story of a life shaped by landscape’, yet as she spoke about her life, which she describes as being able to see ‘laid out’ in their chapters from atop a local hill, I felt that she was instead giving us a landscape shaped by her life. Chester’s narrativization of her personal life interwoven with the topography of West Berkshire goes on to shape our perceptions of this place, even as her life was shaped by the landscape initially. The individual and the landscape become synthesised and invite the reader into an active dialogue with place.

Throughout the day, there were a number of questions raised concerning the struggle of separating fiction and non-fiction in place writing. In the first panel, Amy Liptrot, Anna Fleming and Lily Dunn acknowledged, as non-fiction writers, that ‘memoir can slip precariously into fiction’. Later, Fleming addressed this indirectly as she spoke about the distance between herself and her work. Fleming used an illustration from Melissa Febos’ Body Work which describes memoir writing, not as an egotistical project, but as a process in which the self is made transparent for other people to inhabit. The self becomes detached from the work, simply a skin through which a reader can see the world from a different perspective, or an unfamiliar landscape with clarity. This distancing process steps onto the slippery slope between non-fiction and fiction. I also feel this tension as I write this blog post, emphasising some things and not others in an attempt to curate this day into a sort-of conclusive story, a kind of fiction itself. Yet, on the flip side, fiction writer Fiona Mozley, noted how her books were a kind of non-fiction, reflecting places and experiences in her life. She noted a similar feeling of vulnerable exposure that Liptrot felt in publishing her intimate memoir, The Instant. The relationship between writer, place and story is entangled, creating unique works which sit along a spectrum between fiction and non-fiction.

The relationship between writer, place and story is entangled, creating unique works which sit along a spectrum between fiction and non-fiction.

It was between the last two panels when I noticed a jazzed up literary notice by the door, ‘sleep and waking are two opposed kingdoms. Please be considerate and keep noise to a minimum.’ Perhaps this statement was true when night meant sleep and darkness and the waking kingdom was built anew each day with the dawn chorus, but our nights, more and more, take on their own luminosity and night life.

I thought back to the tube this morning and my shared journey joined with my unlikely travel companions, and the blurring of waking and sleeping kingdoms under artificial light — not opposing but operating simultaneously. As if sitting between kingdoms, like the crossed paths of unlikely travellers, the way writers complement landscape with digital spaces, overlay the past with the present, combine internal emotional life with geographical topography, and blend fiction with non-fiction in ways that are not oppositional but complementary, seems to speak into this current moment. Many of these writers’ responses to place are grounded in the natural place, the urban place, the digital place, the historic place etc., sometimes weaving a narrative from all of these at the same time, giving a richer and deepening experience of what it means to exist in a place in our time.

Sunset at Manchester Piccadilly Station