Arts This article is more than 22 years oldThis land is our land
This article is more than 22 years oldGainsborough, Constable, Turner ...a few great painters have shaped the way we see the countryside. Jonathan Jones begins a new seriesThomas Gainsborough eventually became a brilliant flatterer, but when he painted a squire showing off his wife and land in 1748 or thereabouts he had not yet learned to conceal every wart beneath a cloud of perfume and powder.
Or perhaps it was the provincial rawness of Mr and Mrs Andrews themselves that dictated the surprising frankness of his painting of them on their estate, the Auberies, on the Suffolk-Essex border. They wanted to get it all in - the agricultural richness of their land, its scope, their absolute ownership - as they pose in front of an English oak tree, Mrs Andrews sitting on a convoluted piece of garden furniture. There stands Mr Andrews, shotgun casually dangling, having freshly exercised his right to hunt his fields. The unfinished space under his wife's hands was probably intended to contain a shot pheasant. They have on their best town clothes, Mrs Andrews in that magnificent confection of a dress. We want to like them, but their expressions push us away, put us in our place. This is a private England they are enjoying.
It still is. Today's Auberies Estate Farm feels like somewhere that shouldn't exist, but does - an English country house that still runs much as it did in Mr and Mrs Andrews' day. The gate tucked away in a wood signposted Private, the long tree-lined drive to the house. But then, half expecting the hounds to be unleashed, you find the owner, Nigel, happy to allow you to wander over the fields to photograph what he calls a "fairly knackered" old tree.
He inherited the Auberies from his father, who inherited it from his; they are not descendants of the Andrews, but have been here since about 1850. Nigel says he doesn't like the painting much, although his father made an unsuccessful bid for it when it came up at auction in 1960.
I am here to begin a series of visits to the sites of paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, John Constable and JMW Turner, to look through Romantic eyes for a Britain beyond the current clichés of town versus country. Our present failure to imagine the British landscape as a common cultural property is tragic. Turner, a Londoner who travelled and painted the length and breadth of Britain, made an imaginative claim on this land on behalf of all of us. British landscape paintings are a repository of an alternative sense of nationhood; I am setting out to find it.
Nigel is used to oddballs turning up with requests to see Gainsborough's landscape. Once in his father's day, he remembers, an old man with a long white beard pedalled up on his bike and begged to be allowed to paint "the Gainsborough". His father said "Oh, all right," and the chap painted away in the fields for two days. He'd got the wrong tree, but they didn't like to say anything.
The English oak against which Gainsborough posed the Andrews has grown thicker and wilder since their day. The garden seat is long gone. Now nettles surround the hulking mass. Up above, though, the new leaves are still fresh and green. As sun breaks through the clouds - the most distinctive part of the English landscape, and Gainsborough's painting celebrates them - the shadowed side of the tree seems saturnine, ghostly; around it the grass catches fire.
The tree has displaced the couple who once posed against it, has outlived and outgrown them, and is now a gnarled and grumpy ruin: no longer a rococo decoration, but something more gothic. We find ourselves contemplating the tree itself as a portrait subject, broodingly Rembrandtesque, and this says a lot about our conception of landscape. Because everything has changed since Gainsborough's day.
In the century from 1750 to 1850, just after Gainsborough painted Mr and Mrs Andrews, the British landscape was reimagined by British artists in a radical way. It was transfigured. The landscapes of Turner and Constable, as well as Richard Wilson, Joseph Wright of Derby, Philip James de Loutherbourg and a host of watercolourists, amateur sketch ers and topographical illustrators, mapped Britain as a sublime country. They invented an idea of art as an intensely subjective confrontation with nature, the living, breathing world, that was to become the basis of modern art as it spread from Britain to Europe, to Cézanne, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko.
As we fret about our relationship to "the countryside" - itself a narrow description of the British landscape that would have meant nothing to Turner - it is good to get the Romantic bug, to try to feel what they felt before nature, that quasi-religious communion with light and space. And trees. In one of his letters to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh muses that to understand a landscape, one must begin by drawing a portrait of a tree: "If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one's attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it." Van Gogh's idea of the tree as a living being and therefore a portrait subject is a mark of how feelings changed in the Romantic period.
For Gainsborough too the landscape is living; few artists have ever made nature look so crisply alive. But it is subordinately so. It does not challenge our subjectivity, as it was to do in Romantic art. It is more like a servant. In Romantic art, as Turner lashed himself to a mast (he claimed) to lose himself in the eye of the storm, the lines between self and landscape dissolve, disappear. In Mr and Mrs Andrews, the lines between self and landscape could not be firmer. The landowner and his wife are absolutely set apart from nature. They are its rulers. They stick out almost surreally in their silks and stockings from the farmland that rolls away behind them.
Gainsborough's painting depicts landscape not as a presence before which we stand, but as property. Mr Andrews could not look more confidently proprietorial, could not more explicitly show off his new wife; the church tower in the distance, that of All Saints, Sudbury, reminds us of their marriage there on November 10 1748. He displays emphatically the excellence of his land, which is shown as neatly and systematically cultivated. It's the wealth of the fields that matter to him, not what late 18thcentury aesthetes were to call the "picturesque" qualities of landscape. And that is what he has instructed the young Gainsborough to record.
Gainsborough, though, sees more, thinks more. This is his home landscape - he is a Sudbury man. You can taste that wet, fresh sky, that breezy air. The weather is one of the revolutionary British contributions to art. Before the British came along - as Ruskin demonstrated in his fivevolume book Modern Painters - the weather in painting tended to be an afterthought, a blanket of clouds in a Dutch landscape, a blue canopy in a French one.
Gainsborough is the first great British landscapist, even though most of his landscapes are backgrounds to portraits. And this is precisely because he describes the weather so well. In Mr and Mrs Andrews, the weather is what the British call "changeable". There's a flash of sunlight, but it is precarious, and the fragile light it casts on the grass and the silk dress is threatened by those bulging, rain-filled clouds.
If you compare this with other early Gainsborough paintings of the same kind, juxtaposing East Anglian landowners with their land, it is plain that Mr and Mrs Andrews were unusually crass. Most people by this time were starting to be aware of landscape as a fine and noble thing, and wished to be portrayed as connoisseurs of their land. In Gainsborough's portrait of an unknown couple in a brown, stormy landscape painted in the mid-1750s and now in Dulwich Picture Gallery, the man displays ownership, resting nonchalantly against a fence on his land, but his wife has a pencil and paper to sketch the land - a land they see as romantic and picturesque.
Mr and Mrs Andrews stand against all this. They have no doubt of their relationship to the land as rightful possessors. For all the new visions of landscape since, we still recognise this version of the English countryside and its "custodians". The landscape of Mrs and Mrs Andrews is a country fit for hunting. You can see the seduction, looking at Gainsborough's great painting, with its energy coming out of a tension between two concepts of landscape, his and theirs. He loves the land they own.
And after we've been granted this special glimpse of Gainsborough's private England, so do we. The current owner of The Auberies is much more charming than Mr Andrews appears, and could not have been more helpful, albeit in an amused way. But you leave this landscape the way you came, along the discreet road across the expanse of fields and out of the gate that says Private. You leave the ghosts of Mr and Mrs Andrews lingering in the shadow of that massive English oak, enjoying their property still. This is a very secret corner of the country, and the dead gentry still seem to belong here, in England, their England, more than we do.
Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews is in the National Gallery, London (020-7747 2885). Next week: Constable's The Haywain.
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