Hafod - one of the sites in The Three Landscapes Project

Notes on the Picturesque - Six - The Picturesque

Two quotations about the Picturesque surprised me.

First: "The picturesque interegnum between classic and romantic art was necessary to enable the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eyes"

And second: "The picturesque is the building into experience of the countryside of a comfortable myth ... the gypsy could be an interesting piece of local colour rather than a peripatetic threat to the status quo .... It was a holding operation, by and for the squirearchy which had lost ground and continued to lose ground in the dynamic of country life"

This ‘active' looking makes a great deal of sense - and other details fall into place.

First: The educated gentleman could see nature better if he had in mind a poem by one of the Roman masters - particularly Virgil and Horace - and if he invoked a painting by Claude Lorraine.

Second: The popular 'grand tour' of Europe became problematic as France and England waged war, and the turning of the gaze to Scotland, the Lake District, the Wye valley, and particularly Wales was a significant point In the development of a newly established 'Britishness'.

Third: The term 'Picturesque' comes from the Italian 'pittoresco' which is an adjective defining "a kind of scenery or human activity proper for a painting" - we should note the 'or human activity'.

Fourth: The most translated poem of the 18th century was Horace's Second Epode, in which he proposes a life of contentment in the devotion to a rural residence, a small family, and the 'simple life' in the heart of a varied and interesting 'nature'.

In light of these social, economic and aesthetic ‘projects' by the likes of Johnes and his class, one is forced to wonder what he thought of the indigenous Welsh ‘peasant' or 'farmer'. The Picturesque is not populated, and there are even preferred occupations for the small groups who are present in the picture - a sing1e shepherd is highly desirable, a figure from mythology is also high on the list, but a large community of families at work in the fields would, I imagine, have to be edited out! Also, the ruin is high on the list of architectural presences in the picturesque - the crumbling castle, the purpose-built folly, but not the kind of mud ruin that real farm workers actually lived and died in - where poverty and privation might be too real.

These conditions were so real to these people that great swathes of the Welsh rural population emigrated to America, and during the next century even to Patagonia - often with little knowledge of the lands they were going to and with no financial or other security, such was their desperation.

It is in the consideration of these dynamics within the late 18th century that we begin to sense an anxiety within Johnes and his culture - an anxiety reinforced by the French Revolution, the American colony's newly won independence and the imagined threat of invasion by France, to carry the Revolution further across Europe. If we add into the mix the uprisings in Ireland - Catholic brothers of the French if you like - and the increasing articulation of the ‘Rights of Man' at home and abroad, one wonders whether the local Welsh populace were as grateful for Johnes' magnanimity as their landlord, as Inglis Jones would like us to believe.

The key ‘psychic' moment when all of this comes together for Johnes, I think, is when a French force lands at Abergwaun - Fishguard - in 1797. Abergwaun is only several hours horse ride away. How does 'the Picturesque' deal with this? And how might Johnes' world built around patronage - where King and court acted as fountainhead of all privilege - deal with the madness of their sovereign (King George III suffered from bouts of florid insanity throughout all of the years of Johnes' Hafod project).

As the man said in the quotation above, the Picturesque was 'a holding operation'.

Cliff McLucas