A brush with nature Richard Mabey

摘要

Traditional landscape paintings - though often lovely - distance us from the natural world and fail to reflect any intimacy with our surroundings. It has been an outstanding year for reflections on landscape painting, culminating in the A Picture of Britain exhibition at the Tate and its accompanying BBC tv series. They raised two intriguing questions. Why is the painting of natural landscapes almost invariably done from a distance? And why, given its modern pre-eminence, did it emerge at such a latedate? In poetry, naturalistic evocations of the countryside go back to the sixth century. But in painting, the land 'beyond' was always formalised or abstract - as, for instance, in the emblematic farming scenes of the medieval Books of Hours, or stylised arrangements of landscape props and classical figures in the manner of painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Nothing approaching a view of a patch of the real world appears before the 18th century. It was as if such a thing had previously not been properly seen -or seen in a way that made it transferable to canvas.