Tintern Abbey

"All this is to say that destitutes are salvational figures in the Picturesque. They represent the landed gentry's desire for self-sufficiency, even as they betray their anxieties about accomplishing this ideal during a period of vast economic and social transformations. From an ideological standpoint Ruskin's nobly Picturesque old labourer or Wordsworth's leechgatherer are subject to criticism, for one might say that as long as destitutes are idealised, as long as they are represented as uncomplaining and unconscious of their suffering, no one would be inclined to change their social conditions. Nonetheless, it is impossible to remain unmoved by Ruskin's description of the Calais tower or fail to appreciate the sheer efficacy of the strategy of practitioners of the Picturesque in pinning their ideals onto destitute figures, for in a surprisingly modern way they resolve the problems of identification with ego ideals and the violence that this may bring forth. It is thus that they salvage for themselves an area where the mind can gloat in its freedom and enjoy the sheer playfulness of semi-erotic longings, without confronting the 'dark side of landscape', which the Sublime deepens to tragic proportions."
Raimonda Modiano, 'The Legacy of the Picturesque: landscape, property and ruins' (p. 208), 'Politics of the Picuresque' ed. Steven Copley and Peter Garside, 1994, pub.  Cambridge University Press, Great Britain.

Tintern Abbey

What happens to landscape and the figure in landscape? I guess the answer is Modernism and the city. This is a fine quote from The dark side of the landscape. The rural poor in English painting 1730 - 1840 (1983).

"What is true of Constable's later painting is true also of much of the landscape-painting of the mid-nineteenth century, though for different reasons, and probably because, by then, the labourer in agriculture is no longer, and is no longer regarded as, the prototypical English worker. The concern of the rich has shifted to the worker in industry ; and it is he who seems to carry the burden of England's economic progress, and he who seems capable of threatening it by indiscipline, idleness or revolt. And though for reasons that need not detain us here, the value of the rural community as it had been traditionally defined, and as it had been reaffirmed in the poetry of Wordsworth, is strengthened and emphasised in the Victorian novel as a better alternative to the anonymity of industrial civilization, in poetry and painting the countryside comes to take on the simply negative virtue of not being the city. It is no longer a place of tension, as we will find it to be in the paintings of Gainsborough, Morland and Constable, but one defined as empty of tension ; a place of refreshment and recreation, where we may recover the sense of our potential as sensitive individuals which is lost in the urban life of affairs - a sentence full of clichés, but so is the sense it describes. The inhabitants of the countryside can now be presented as unproblematically at one with their surroundings..."  (p.p. 32 - 33)

Tintern Abbey

I have luckily been appointed to one of three artists' residencies at Tintern Abbey. Earlier I had made a piece of work that referenced the Picutresque (see the earlier post below)

For the residency I am looking more closely at the text of Gilpin's visit to the abbey in 1770 and the place of the figure in the Picturesque landscape, most particularly the destitute figure.