Romancing the stones

If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long been seen as works of art themselves. ‘The whole temple of Avebury may be consider’d as a picture’, enthused the antiquary William Stukeley in 1743, while ‘my God how sculptural’ was Barbara Hepworth’s response to Cornish sites such as the Mên-an-Tol and the Nine Maidens which she encountered after moving to St Ives in 1939. The creative tension between artists and these mysterious presences in the landscape is the subject of Sam Smiles’s engaging book British Art: Ancient Landscapes, published to accompany an exhibition at the Salisbury Museum (until 3 September).

Taking us on a tour of sites, albeit one in which we repeatedly find ourselves back at Stonehenge, Smiles demonstrates how all artists reinvent ancient monuments. Some, he tells us, do it more audaciously than others: oddly, it is in a drawing purporting to be a sober work of documentation that we see the most outlandish results of imaginative engagement. Stukeley’s theory that Avebury had been a Druidic temple got the better of his judgment; manipulating the landscape to fit his notion of serpentine avenues he made the complex appear ‘more snake-like than his own surveys had revealed’.

It wasn’t long before megalithic structures began to feature in ambitious paintings teeming with bards and druids, but in the late 18th century they were regarded as portable feasts. Would the grandeur of Stonehenge, wondered Thomas Jones, be lessened if it were found ‘amidst high rocks, lofty mountains and hanging Woods?’ As Smiles wryly observes, he answers his own question with ‘The Bard’ of 1774, a stagey composition in which the relocated standing stones become a diminutive chorus line, dwarfed by huge blasted trees and rocky outcrops.