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)
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