Book Review: Susan Owens, 'Spirit of Place' (2020)
This recent survey of the British landscape seen through the eyes of artists and writers falls short of its grand intentions...
This slickly presented paperback from famed art publishers Thames & Hudson proclaims its remit on its stylish cover: ‘Artists, Writers, and the British Landscape’. This simple summary would seem at odds with the rather more mystical and subjective origins of the title, ‘Spirit of Place’. Whilst artists and writers have mined the rich vein of emotion in the soil for centuries, and to a great extent have moulded the way we see our own country, they do not create the spirit and will be among the first to admit that themselves, something Owens risks overlooking.
Moving quickly through the centuries in this readable and well-paced survey, Owens welcomes us to the exploration of the land through the artist's eyes with the murk and mist of the Dark Ages. There is none of the fashionable reframing of the early middle ages as a misunderstood era of light and energy, instead, Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Bede and Langland are liberally quoted to re-enchant our feelings for the period. The landscape is posed as a threatening, supernatural, and frequently deadly antagonist to the people who clung to this wet rock in the north Atlantic. She mostly uses texts in this section of the book for want of images. Depictions of the landscape were rare in the medieval period and the well-known survivors tend to belong to France and Italy. However, Owens does explore the tantalising written records of a fashion for extensive landscape-based domestic decoration, from fresco to tapestry, none of which survives.
In this first section of the book, one of the stronger passages, the wider thematic discussion and the playful interaction with quotations manages to evoke a whiff of that elusive spirit of place whilst also avoiding falling into a continuous list of examples from which other chapters suffer.
As we move into the Elizabethan era examples from Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Olivers introduce a deeper connection between human feeling and the subtleties of the landscape. It is a claim that, while undoubtedly accurate, Owens makes by a series of rather unsupported leaps based on readings of the paintings in question. This is a shame as quotations from Burton’s masterly Anatomy of Melancholy, which would have perfectly supported her argument, fly past with little examination. From this point onwards, as the surviving visual culture expands, writers begin to play a decidedly second fiddle to artists. Whilst our strong visual history of landscape painters is well known, the writers who shared their passion are neglected, and although this book drags up some from their popular obscurity such as the farm-boy poet John Clare and regency seeker of the picturesque William Gilpin, others who spoke so beautifully and importantly about Britain are missed entirely (John Betjeman, Jerome K. Jerome, Virginia Woolf, and J.L. Carr to name but a few).
There are enticing biographies of early antiquarians and their search for the neolithic rituals and remains scattering these islands. A particularly evocative anecdote tells of John Aubrey convincing King Charles II to visit the stone circles at Avebury on the promise that they were much more impressive than Stonehenge. Owens paints us a picture of Aubrey and The King standing atop the equally mysterious Silbury Hill, gazing out at the megaliths strewn over the chalky downs.
Once the British have learnt to love their landscape, Owen’s focus shifts squarely to the Lake District, there taking in Coleridge and Wordsworth as well as the early tourist industry of well-to-do city types striving a little too hard to improve themselves at the shrine of nature. We read about the ‘Claude glasses’ that were taken everywhere, lightly tinted mirrors that one would use to view scenic vistas over one's shoulder. The thought was that by neatly framing and shrinking the scene in reflection, as well as giving it a golden patina, the cold British landscape would come to better resemble the landscape paintings of Mediterranean painters like Claude Lorraine, so popular with British collectors.
There are enjoyable comic diversions with entertaining biographical detail. Thomas Gainsborough is characterised as a frustrated landscape painter who was forced to paint endless society portraits to support his wife and two spinster daughters. He is quoted in his letters wishing those ‘people with their damned faces would let me alone’ and that ‘I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease’. Whilst not bringing a great deal of detail to our understanding of the spirit of place, these interludes nonetheless add characterful colour to Owens’ sweeping narrative.
What becomes distinctly apparent is quite how fluctuating the public feeling for landscape became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sometimes the appearance of mechanical industry in the landscape is praised as a beautiful example of symbiosis or the wildness of the country coming squarely under the thumb of human control. Whilst only a few years later the ‘dark satanic mills’ are the subject of horrified hyperbole and apocalyptic painting. Naturally, JMW Turner and John Constable feature heavily in this book but never to the point of nausea and never at the expense of other Victorian painters. Constable is examined as a local painter who knew and loved the lived-in landscape, whilst Turner was a painter of imagination and atmosphere, half in love with machines, mountains, and storms.
We are also shown how many of the famous late-Victorian writers, Conan Doyle, Dickens, and Hardy especially, give their landscapes threatening and downright deadly characters. The boggy ground of Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles devours horses and men alike, whilst Hardy’s Edgon Heath kills through exposure, downing, and poison and is the ‘unmoved mover’ of the plot in his novel The Return of the Native. This is balanced by a pedantic and often slavish dedication to the most minute details of nature advocated by Ruskin and explored by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Although the obvious rhyme between William Morris’ nature-filled wallpaper designs and the aforementioned prevalence of landscape in early modern home decoration goes unexplored in this volume.
The relationship between artists and the landscape in the first half of the last century is of particular interest to me, and Owens offers a flying run-down of some of the key figures. Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash, two artists who more than almost all others were obsessed with the spirit of place, get a moment in the spotlight…but it is only a moment. Focus swiftly moves to the post-war years of Moore, Hepworth, Piper, and Sutherland. This is rather a disappointment as the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s are a rich seam of artists and writers who engaged deeply with a sense of place and the role of nature in manufacturing it. I would go as far as to argue that our modern relationship with places and landscapes has its origins in the cultural figures of the early twentieth century. Whether the eponymous house and garden in Forster’s Howards End, the personified role that plants, hills, and rivers play in Woolf’s Orlando, or the deeply physiological currents that connect places and landscapes in the works of T.S. Eliot - none of these seemingly vital texts gets included in Owens book. Neither do many interesting painters including Spencer Gore, Stanley Spencer, or John Nash.
However, the most screaming absence from this book is music. The defining art form of the British countryside in the twentieth century was undoubtedly music. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Ethel Smyth, George Butterworth, and Gerald Finzi, to name but a handful, through their quests to record the provincial folk tunes and catalogue the hymns and anthems sung in churches and chapels across the land, created a musical map of a nation in a state of profound change. Even the titles of their works evoke a strong sense of landscape: The Lark Ascending, Egdon Heath, On Wenlock Edge, By the Banks of Greenwillow etc. Not even Edward Elgar, a man whose music has become part of the physical fabric of the Malvern Hills, is alluded to in the book. It is hard to think of these scenes Owens recounts without hearing the strains of these composers in one's mind.
She brings her account right up to date by discussing artists and writers who were recently, or are currently, at work in the landscape. W.G. Sebald moves onto Robert McFarlane, Derek Jarman passes the touch to Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. Even works documenting the receding coastline of East Anglia as recently as 2019 are included.
Susan Owen’s ‘Spirit of Place’ is a well-paced and timely book. After the covid years, when our attention became focused on our own local landscapes and the daily walks became increasingly precious, place and landscape have very much returned to our lives. The lack of international travel encouraged many people to rediscover corners of our own island they had previously overlooked. Owens convincingly reveals that this is nothing new, the landscape has played on the minds of Britons for all time, whether as a threat or balm, a place of science or a place of mystery. These changing attitudes and responses to the landscape are nicely paired with the shifting nature of the places themselves, whether that is industry arriving, migration of people, or more recently the altering climate destroying and remaking the shape of the land.
Where this book falls short is in the lofty goal set by its title, the ‘spirit of place’ remains unexplored through the chapters of this survey. It is an amorphous thing and very hard to pin down, so subjective and so based on nuanced feeling and circumstance but possible to extrapolate from the works of great artists, Owens repeatedly stops short of this. She never explores the deeper connections to place in her work, staying rather within the realms of what the consensus was on hills and valleys in any given period. It is general, never personal, and thus misses out on that gold dust that is the relationship between a person and a place.
‘Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers & The British Landscape’ by Susan Owens was published by Thames & Hudson in 2020.