grandeur and vulgarity

Does the presence of an angler enhance the beauty of a rural landscape or detract from it? Should a painter add the figures of fishermen to scenes of pastoral beauty or omit them if they are actually there in reality? Strange though these questions may be, they did in fact receive discussion in previous eras and that's what I want to write about today.

In 1786, William Gilpin - the great theorist of the 'picturesque' - published a two-volume work with the title Observations relative chiefly to picturesque beauty made in the year 1772 on several parts of England particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland. The work is essentially a travel narrative but, as he goes along, Gilpin comments continuously on the extent to which particular locations and vistas can offer an experience of picturesque beauty to the observer.

His account of this aesthetic category is complex - it is not entirely a property of a landscape but arises in the interaction between the human observer and the external prospect. In particular, it involves a certain kind of experience of pleasure in the act of looking. And, since nature is not always 'properly' picturesque, it may require some enhancement when it is translated into imagery by the artist or text by the poet.

Heading south past Great and Little Mell Fell towards the north shore of Ullswater, Gilpin observes that the area is 'well inhabited':

It was about the time of a statute-fair; when the young people of the country leave their old services, and go to their new: and we were not a little entertained with the simplicity, and variety of the several groups and figures we met, both on horseback, and on foot.

He is prepared to see these figures as picturesque enhancements to the landscape. But he balks at seeing labourers with the tools of their trades - 'the spade, the scythe, and the rake' - as appropriate elements in a composition that aspires to any grandeur. He remarks that that which gives moral pleasure - scenes of 'cultivation', for example - do not give aesthetic pleasure, for 'the picturesque eye [...] ranges after nature untamed by art, and bursting wildly into all its irregular forms'. The same, he adds, applies to human figures:

In a moral view, the industrious mechanic is a more pleasing object, that the loitering peasant. But in a picturesque light, it is otherwise. The arts of industry are rejected; and even idleness, if I may so speak, adds dignity to a character. Thus the lazy cow-herd resting on his pole; or the peasant lolling on a rock, may be allowed in the grandest scenes; while the laborious mechanic, with his impliments [sic] of labour, would be repulsed.

 This leads Gilpin on to consider the representation of anglers in paintings:

The fisherman, it is true, may follow his calling upon the lake: but he is indebted for this privilege, not to his art; but to the picturesque apparatus of it - his boat, and his nets, which qualify his art. They are the objects: he is but an appendage. Place him on the shore, as a single figure, with his rod, and line; and his art would ruin him. In a chearful glade, along a purling brook, near some mill, or cottage, let him angle, if he please: in such a scene the picturesque eye takes no offence. But let him take care not to introduce the vulgarity of his employment in a scene of grandeur.

There is clearly a politics to the judgements that are made here, a point that has been much discussed in contemporary scholarship on the picturesque. For Gilpin, economic activity has to be erased from the landscape in order to preserve its aesthetic qualities and the working people of the region are welcome only if they leave their tools at home and, ideally, dress in 'long folding draperies' or as 'gypsies, bandittit, and soldiers, - not in modern regimentals, but as Virgil paints them, "- longis adnixi hastis, et scuta tenentes"' (i.e. 'learning on spears and bearing shields').

But how do work, leisure, and the aesthetics of the countryside interact in our own perceptions of fishing? I came across an ethnographic study by Massimiliano Mollona - Made in Sheffield - which argues that 'fishing is an act of working-class appropriation of nature and urban spaces against speculations, relocations, diversions and enclosures by capitalists, aristocrats, bureaucrats and middle-class environmentalists'. And he points to a kind of aesthetic judgement on the part of 'middle-class anglers' for whom 'coarse fishing is a debasing sport because it is practised collectively in domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped "brownfields") with domesticated fish.'

I don't know if middle-class anglers really do see coarse fishing as a 'debasing' sport but the aesthetic conflict implicit in this political division does seem recognisable - the 'artificial pond' with its 'domesticated fish' set against the romantic image of the sparkling trout stream or the 'noble salmon' with its strange and heroic ways of living and dying. The mention of the 'urban canal' as the site of a 'working-class appropriation' reminds me of my walks out east through the old industrial areas on the edge of the city centre and of another type of nature - 'modern nature'? - that contrasts with the 'romantic nature' associated by Derek Jarman with the Kent of Constable and Palmer.

This work by the 19th-century US painter Thomas Moran depicts the 17th-century artist, Salvator Rosa, sketching a group of banditti. Shortly after mentioning bandits as adding to the character of 'a scene of grandeur', Gilpin refers to Rosa as one whose works were a 'model' of how to incorporate the human figure into a landscape.