Ordinary Landscape:The Ideal Inhabited Environment In Gainsborough And Constable’ Rural Paintings

In order to change the new homogenization of rural landscape accompanied by the construction of Chinese beautiful countryside,the British experience which benefit from “art into landscape” was incorporated into our reference of rural construction.This paper takes the methods of the iconography and art history to research the rural images,landscape characteristics and its forming process of the Stour Valley in Suffolk reproduced by Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable,which were the most famous local landscape painters between the mid-18 th and the early 19 th century.In the following discussion,the movement of parliamentary enclosure and the evolution of the natural conception are the two intertwined clue of this paper.From the mid-18 th century to the early 19 th century,the Stour Valley countryside underwent a landscape transformation from the common woodland landscape to the large-scale enclosed agricultural landscape,which was directly related to the parliamentary enclosure movement and the agricultural improvement.Moreover,with the development of the urban-rural integration in British,the villages in the Stour Valley have completed the transformation of agricultural industrialization and commercialization,and been incorporated into an urban-rural system with London at its core through the Stour Canal.In this process,the common woodland was continuously cleared,and the independent and self-sufficient common life supported by the open-field system gradually disintegrated.The woodland countryside in Gainsborough paintings and the Stour Valley landscape in Constable paintings not only recorded the influence of the parliamentary enclosure movement,but also reflected different aesthetic attitudes to the rural landscape between Gainsborough and Constable.Under the dual influence of the natural science and the natural beauty concept,the "picturesque" became the most important achievement in the evolution of the natural beauty concept in England from the 18 th century,which against the taste for a prosperous,productive agricultural landscape,furthermore,separated the moral values,economic interests and aesthetic pleasures into independent parts.In the early 19 th century,the search for the “picturesque” beauty was substituted a new taste for wild nature,which could be called English romantic landscape aesthetics.The development of the natural aesthetic concepts contributed to the localization of English rural landscape painting.Virgil’s poetry and the European classical paintings cultivated the English painters’ tastes for the ideal pastoral landscape,and the popularity of Netherland paintings promoted the preference to those ordinary rural scenes.Owe to the enlightenment of Gainsborough,Constable developed a naturalistic approach to representing landscapes,which not only marked his completely liberation from the “picturesque” taste,but also signified the ordinary and always neglected things entering into the sight of aesthetics.The ordinary landscape in Constable’s paintings is a kind of “humanized landscape”,where ordinary people living and at work.And the social order is in harmony with natural processes.Since the 19 th century,this “home scenery” was constructed and recognized as a typical British landscape image,which created a spiritual nationality for the British people who had to migrate in the process of urbanization.Since the 20 th century,a series of rural conservation associations have been established in Britain to protect the integrity of rural culture,nature and society.These rural aesthetic,theoretical and practical experiences which value ordinary landscape highly provide useful inspirations for our rural policy adjustment,landscape design and public education.