THE IDEOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE: GAINSBOROUGH, CONSTABLE AND THE ENGLISH RUSTIC TRADITION

The emergence of rustic landscape as a major genre of painting in England at the end of the eighteenth century coincides with the accelerated enclosure of the English country side. The dissertation proposes that the commercial reification of the real landscape from a place into a commodity finds its aesthetic counterpart in the genre of rustic landscape painting which took for its subject scenes of English rural scenery and country life. It examines how rustic landscape painting intersects with the agrarian revolution, and echoes certain prevailing cultural values that link it directly to enclosure. Accordingly, it discusses the formal means through which the genre indirectly inscribes these values as well as those instances where it appears to register contradictions within dominant ideologies and even challenges or transcends their values. It is with these considerations in mind that the period from roughly 1750 to 1850 is examined here, and that the landscapes of Gainesborough, Constable, the Picturesque painters, and the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates are analysed. Chapter one sketches out the way changing social attitudes towards nature in the mid-eighteenth century are reflected in the landscape garden, bourgeois manners, the outdoor conversation piece, and the rustic landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough. Chapter two discusses the aesthetic theories of the Picturesque as various forms of nostalgia for the pre-commercial, pre-enclosed landscape which paradoxically work to enforce the contemporary economic values that contributed to the old landscape's decline. Chapter three is a close formal study of the landscapes of John Constable and a discussion of their ideological significance. The forth and final chapter discusses the Victorian suburb as a logical extension of industrial society's endorsement of rural nature and its simultaneous destruction of it. The dissertation concludes by considering the relevance of its method and approach to the study of other types of landscape painting of the period, most notably the sublime landscapes of J. M. W. Turner and the pastoral scenes of Samuel Palmer.