Pastoral visions

I’d never really looked at landscapes with cows until a student experience brought them sharply into focus. I was standing in front of one at a tutor’s party when I noticed the boy next to me staring at it. As I wondered what had so captured his imagination, he suddenly gasped, ‘God, I’m hungry!’

There are a lot of cows, and sheep, in Compton Verney’s new exhibition of landscapes from the Royal Academy’s collection, but they’re not there to whet the appetites of starving students. Rather, runs the thesis behind the show, their presence lends credibility to a pastoral vision of England designed to appeal to the new class of industrialist collector that came into being with the Royal Academy in 1768. Most of the landscapes here were painted in London for city walls. They reflect new money and new insecurities — hence the exhibition’s title, Opulence and Anxiety.

For its curator Tim Barringer, the show represents ‘an extraordinary opportunity to rummage in the repressed subconscious, as it were, of British landscape’. It is also a chance to dust off diploma works by half-forgotten RAs that have lain undisturbed in the vaults since first deposited. The fact that these works were self-selected, Barringer points out, gives the exhibition another USP as an independent insight into English art history uncoloured by Francocentric avant-garde prejudice.

The 50 paintings by 40 artists are hung in five rooms, sensibly arranged — to avoid anticlimax — around a hub of masterpieces: Gainsborough’s ‘Romantic Landscape’ (c.1783), Turner’s ‘Dolbadern Castle’ (1800) and Constable’s ‘A Boat Passing a Lock’ (1826), plus five oil sketches. A 1791 painting of the earthly paradise of Tahiti by the Resolution’s resident artist John Webber points up the escapist agenda of English landscape painting of the period: when not looking back to an idealised past, it looked into the far distance.