From The English Love Affair with Nature. 3.2: Art
Nature appears in an astonishing range of artistic genres. Pets gaze sentimentally at loving owners. Wild beasts crouch, snarl and fight. Prize bulls and champion racehorses gleam proudly. Vegetables, flowers and fruits are artfully arranged in still lifes. Accurate botanical and zoological illustrations beautify the pages of learned monographs. Proprietorial gentlemen pose impressively in front of magnificent estates. Cows graze peacefully in rural landscapes. Ships struggle through stormy seascapes. Floral motifs march decoratively across wallpapers, textiles and ceramics. Modern art quarries nature for patterns, shapes, colours, textures, pigments, reflections, ideas. Nature has informed art, and art has returned the favour, bringing nature in her thousand guises to an enchanted English public.
Some of England’s best-loved artists made their reputations painting images where nature was a major theme, whether as subject or background. Thomas Gainsborough’s pictures, for example, delicately interweave human and natural subjects. His 1782 Girl with Pigs, admired at the Royal Academy but made fun of in verse by ‘Peter Pindar’ (the satirist John Wolcot), places an idealised, romantically-dressed swineherd with her young pigs in a dramatically lit parklike landscape. Gainsborough intentionally avoided grand historical or mythological themes; this was a ‘fancy picture’, in which the artist showed off his skill and imagination, as opposed to his portraits, where he was constrained both by the need to achieve a likeness and by the wishes of his subjects. In Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted around 1750, the wealthy couple try to look relaxed in their finery, staring straight out of the painting, she resplendent in a wide-skirted pale blue satin dress and seated stiffly on an iron bench, he standing with his dog and elegantly long slim shotgun. They are depicted in a fertile landscape glowing with sheaves of corn; we glimpse a distant field of sheep, cattle and a church tower peeping out coyly from between the trees, the sky gathering handsome summer cumulus clouds. Here is the English countryside as property and symbol of wealth and status: nature is the measure of what is to be desired.
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