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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Force of nature

Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October

Don’t be misled by the title: although in its entirety this is a wide-ranging exhibition, it was organised by Southampton Art Gallery (and thus draws heavily on that remarkable permanent collection) and was originally intended for a much larger musem. In Bath, restrictions of space mean the show had to be cut in half — but like an earthworm, both halves have continued to flourish. Part 1 dealt with the historical context, the Samuel Palmers, the Graham Sutherlands and the Paul Nashes, and Part 2 comes up to date with the Brotherhood of Ruralists. This is particularly fitting as the Ruralists lived (mostly) in the West Country and foregathered from time to time in Bath. But I’m not so certain about this notion of coming up to date. Although there are recent works here by the Ruralists, there is nothing by other Romantics who might be equally at home in such exalted company. I can think of a number of artists whose paintings embody a romantic landscape vision of the poetic and the particular: Jeffery Camp, George Rowlett and Julian Perry, to name but three. Is then this selection rather a predictable one? I shall attempt to answer that later.

As viewers who now visit the Victoria Art Gallery may have missed Part 1 of the exhibition, let me give you an idea of the ground it covered. The overarching theme is the effect of Samuel Palmer’s etchings on 20th-century British art (Sutherland called Palmer the English van Gogh), but to state it so baldly is not particularly helpful. Palmer did not spring fully armed from the head of Zeus, but was hugely under the influence of that arch visionary, William Blake. So the show in fact begins with Blake’s marvellous illustrations to Thornton’s ‘Pastorals of Virgil’ (generously given to Southampton as part of the David Brown Bequest). Palmer described them revealingly as: ‘Visions of little dells, and nooks and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisite pitch of intense poetry.’ He could have been writing about his own work that was to have such an influence on F. L. Griggs, and through him, on the early etchings of Graham Sutherland.

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