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Space, Status and Gender in English Topographical Paintings c. 1660–c. 1740

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Anne Laurence
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Extract

The topographical paintings of English country houses which appeared in considerable numbers in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries have provided architectural historians with valuable evidence of architectural schemes and gardens. John Harris’s catalogues and commentaries on these paintings have been of great importance for both architectural and social historians. Rarely, however, is much attention paid to the human figures who people the paintings and who provide an insight into the ways in which the spaces delineated were used and, in particular, the occupation of the space in and around the country house by people of different classes and sexes. They show how access to the house was organized and the kinds of activity that took place in the vicinity of the house as an extension of the life of the house, rather than as part of the agricultural enterprise that supported the house and its occupants. Like Dutch genre scenes, the paintings celebrate domestic peace and prosperity; but, like human portraiture, these portraits of houses depict the subject in its best light and hint at the patrons’ aspirations, the figures contributing as much to the image of the patron’s possessions as the building itself. These paintings perform the essentially practical function of showing the house for the patron’s descendants, possibly asserting ownership, but at the same time representing the an ideally harmonious life and the peaceful prosperity of the owners. The myth created is a modest one, of homely pursuits and submissive servants, a myth which could not be represented without the figures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 46 , 2003 , pp. 81 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2003

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Girouard, Mark, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, 1978)Google Scholar; Strong, Roy, The Renaissance Garden in England (London, 1979)Google Scholar; ‘The Anglo-Dutch garden in the age of William and Mary’, Journal of Garden History, 8, special issue, nos 2 and 3 (1988); Mowl, Timothy and Earnshaw, Brian, Architecture without Kings: The Rise of Puritan Classicism under Cromwell (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar; Wilson, Richard and Mackley, Alan, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House 1660-1880 (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Jacques, David, ‘Garden design in the mid-seventeenth-century’, Architectural History, 44 (2001), pp. 364-76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An exemplary use of topographical paintings for architectural historical purposes is to be found in John Cornforth, ‘Who used the front door?’, Country Life, 7 December 2000, pp. 116-21.

2 The most important single collection is that at the Yale Center for British Art at New Haven, Conn., USA, described in Cormack, Malcolm, Country Houses in Great Britain (New Haven, 1979)Google Scholar. Other such paintings are documented in Steegman, John, The Artist and the Country House: Descriptive Notes by Dorothy Stroud on the Houses Illustrated in the Paintings (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Harris, John, The Artist and the English Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting in Britain 1540-1870 (London, 1979)Google Scholar; and Harris, John, The Artist and the Country House from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1996)Google Scholar. A high proportion of these paintings remain in private hands.

3 Daniels, Stephen, ‘Godly prospects: English estate portraiture 1670-1730’, in Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Art and Cartography, ed. Alfrey, N. and Daniels, S. (Nottingham, 1990), pp. 9–12 Google Scholar (p. 9); Barrell, John, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 6 Google Scholar, 9.

4 McBride, Kari Boyd, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: a Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (Aldershot, 2001), p. 144 Google Scholar,138.

5 Steegman, The Artist and the Country House, p. 18; Russell, Francis, ‘The hanging and display of pictures’, in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Jackson-Stops, Gervase et al. (Hanover and London, 1989), pp. 133-54Google Scholar (P. 133).

6 Daniels, ‘Godly prospects’, p. 10; Huxley, Anthony, The Painted Garden: The Garden through the Artist’s Eye (Windward, Leicester, 1988), p. 46 Google Scholar; Cormack, Country Houses, pp. 7-9. Strong, Roy discusses points of view in The Artist and the Garden (New Haven, 2000), pp. 11–12 Google Scholar, 144.

7 Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, pp. 98,54,123,144; Strong, The Artist and the Garden, p. 132.

8 Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, p. 49.

9 In the absence of a name, Harris identifies one painter as ‘the master of the uninhabited garden’. Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, p. 97.

10 Halpern, Linda Cabe, ‘The uses of painting in garden history’, in Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods, ed. Hunt, John Dixon (Washington D.C., 1992), pp. 183–202 Google Scholar (p. 198).

11 I am grateful to Malcolm Warner of the Yale Center for British Art for this point. See Warner, Malcolm and Alexander, Julia Marciari, This Other Eden: Paintings from the Yak Center for British Art: Catalogue (New Haven, 1998), p. 36 Google Scholar.

12 An unusual variant is the picture at Erdigg, Clwyd, showing the estate carpenter with the house in the background.

13 Barley, M. W., ‘Rural building in England’, in The Buildings of the Countryside 1500-1750: Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Barley, M. W. (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 81–176 Google Scholar (pp. 101-02).

14 Vries, Lyckle de, ‘The changing face of realism’, in Art in History: History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. Freedberg, David and Vries, Jan de (Chicago, 1991), pp. 209-44Google Scholar (pp. 224-25).

15 Christopher Christie suggests that patrons preferred to be reminded of the landscape of Italy than their own surroundings, turning in the later eighteenth century to painters such as Richard Wilson (17137-82) to provide idealized English landscapes. Christie, Christopher, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 2000), p. 199 Google Scholar, 201.

16 See the essays in Art in History: History in Art, ed. by Freedberg and Vries, especially Lyckle de Vries, ‘The changing face of realism’, pp. 209-244.

17 Bruyn, Josua, ‘Towards a scriptural reading of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings’, in Musters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, ed. Sutton, Peter C. (London, 1987), pp. 85–100 Google Scholar.

18 Steegman, The Artist and the Country House, p. 11; Solkin, David H., Richard Wilson: the Landscape of Reaction (London, 1982), p. 32 Google Scholar.

19 For an exception, see Siberechts, ‘Cheveley, Cambridgeshire’, 1681, which shows a woman riding in the foreground, in Strong, The Artist and the Garden, pp. 158-59.

20 One appears in Knyff, ‘Elevated View of Old Petworth House’, 1680s, in Harris, The Artist and the Country House, p. 43.

21 Roberts, Michael, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979), pp. 3–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Gascoigne, George, The Noble Art of Venerie (London, 1575), p. 90 Google Scholar,130 shows Queen Elizabeth at a hunting feast and watching a deer being cut up. Later editions, probably after the queen’s death, replaced the female figure with a man. John Wootton (1678?-1765) painted a number of scenes including women hunting, for example, ‘Lady Henrietta Harley Hunting with Harriers’, c. 1740, as did James Seymour (1702-52), for example, ‘A Coursing Scene’ and ‘Stag Hunting’. See Coombs, David, Sport and the Countryside in English Paintings, Watercolours and Prints (Oxford, 1978), pp. 32–33 Google Scholar, 20, 39; Vandervell, Anthony and Coles, Charles, Game and the English Landscape (London, 1980), p. 28 Google Scholar, 35.

23 Bernes, J., A Jewell for Gentrie (London, 1614), p. 80 Google Scholar,112, shows the queen, attendants and falcons attacking a heron.

24 Waterside views, whose popularity Harris notes, often show figures in the foreground. Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, p. 11.

25 Everitt, Alan, ‘Farm labourers’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4, 1500-1640, ed. Thirsk, Joan (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 396–465 Google Scholar (pp. 430-35). Wage rates were set by local magistrates, see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Various Collections, 1 (1901), pp. 162-63, 164, 169, 174; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Rutland, 1, pp. 460-62 respectively for Wiltshire (1602-85) and Lincolnshire (1621) wage rates.

26 Huntington Library, San Marino, Hastings MS HAF 38(5), Account book of Theophilus, 9th Earl of Huntingdon at Donnington, 1738-39.

27 Hastings MS HAF 38(5).

28 Hastings MS HAF 38(5).

29 The Earl of Cardigan, ‘Domestic expenses of a nobleman’s household: 1678’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 32 (1951), pp. 108-42Google Scholar (pp. 110-14); Selections from the Household Books of Lord William Howard ofNaworth Castle, 1612-1640, Surtees Society, 68 (1878), pp. 36-41.

30 Anon., Averham Park, Notts in Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, p. 139; Yorks, Kirkleatham in Britannia Illustrata or Views of Several of the Queens Palaces as also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain, Curiously Engraven on 80 Copper Plates (London, 1714) (1st edn, 1707)Google Scholar.

31 For example, the various series depicting Ledstone Hall, Yorkshire; Hampton Court, Herefordshire and Dixton Manor, Gloucestershire in Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, pp. 192-93, col. pls xv-xvib, p. 270 and col. pl. xxiv.

32 Thirsk, Joan, ‘Agricultural innovations and their diffusion’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Thirsk, Joan, vol. 5, ii, 1640-1750 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 533-89Google Scholar (p. 533). See also Thirsk, Joan, Alternative Agriculture: A History (Oxford, 1997), pp. 43–71 Google Scholar.

33 Thirsk, ‘Agricultural innovations’, p. 565.

34 Thirsk, ‘Agricultural innovations’, p. 581

35 Thirsk, ‘Agricultural innovations’, pp. 575-77-

36 Barley, ‘Rural building in England’, p. 168. For the anonymous ‘Denham House’, see Harris, The Artist and the English Country House, col. pl. XIV, and Setterington, ‘South elevation of ledstone hall’, see Harris, The Artist and the Country House, p. 54, col. pl. 26.

37 Clemenson, Heather A., English Country Houses and Landed Estates (London, 1982), pp. 79–82 Google Scholar.

38 Friedman, Alice T., ‘Architecture, authority, and the female gaze: planning and representation in the early modern country house’, Assemblage, 18 (1992), pp. 41–61 Google Scholar (p. 44).

39 Friedman, ‘Architecture, authority and the female gaze’, p. 44.