One of our trips during our recent expedition to London was to the National Gallery. This fitted well with our interests for two reasons. Not long ago we watched a TV film about Turner, and also I thought that it would fit well also with my developing interest in the diversity of relationships depicted in art between humanity and nature.* I hadn’t realised before that one of the rooms in the gallery encourages a comparison of this kind, including in the same space work by Turner, Stubbs, Constable and Gainsborough.
I was particularly struck by the face that somebody like Gainsborough, working in the “classical” tradition, is content with the depiction of rather generic “trees”. With Constable you can tell the difference between an oak tree and a beech tree. That actually tells you something significant, I believe. Am I reading too much into the fact that Stubbs’ Whistlejacket has us admiring this wonderful horse which is over there. Constable’s Hay Wain places the object of attention (the cart bearing the human beings) in the water. It really seemed to me to be important to distinguish between using Nature either as a background to human activity, or as the object of our interest, in art, and showing us human beings present in Nature and involved with it.
On the way out I wandered by accident into the Impressionist room, and found myself confronted by some magnificent Monet waterlilies. That is the truly wonderful thing about the National Gallery. You never know what is going to confront you and grab your attention. The experience, in the context of the day, was quite a surprise. I came to the conclusion that he wasn’t actually very interested in waterlilies per se. All that engaged him was light and paint. He wasn’t, from one point of view, very interested in something we might call “Nature”.
*I might have mentioned this already in a recent post. I find it interesting to think about the different implications of thinking about this relationship either in terms of “the Creation”, “Nature” and (more recently) “the Environment”.