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I wonder what you picture when you think of heaven? I once
found something close to mine in a vineyard far from home. It was in a wide
valley, neat and green with orderly rows of vines and small white-washed
farmhouses and surrounded by tall and impressive mountains.
There was a sense of heavenly peace, order and beauty as well as grandeur.
This is what heaven will look like, I thought at the time.
For Sir Stanley Spencer though, his vision of heaven was much
closer to home – his private paradise was Cookham in Berkshire where he grew up
and lived throughout his life. Although best known for his mystical biblical
scenes set in the suburban setting of Cookham –the current exhibition at the
Compton Verney Gallery focuses on his paintings of the garden landscapes and
houses of his home village. Like the pre-Raphaelites, Spencer delighted in the detail of nature and painted the
flowers and trees growing in the well-tended front gardens and in the overgrown
alleys and backyards, leaf by leaf and blade by blade.
Just as I found the
ordered rows of vines reassuringly restful, so Spencer revelled in the neatly
clipped privet hedges and the weed-free flower beds which he could see as a
child from his bedroom window or from glimpses through chinks and cracks in
fences. Spencer's paintings of Wisteria dripping in heavy profusion from house
walls are especially striking. Such lush and extreme images of beauty can risk
being cloying but within Spencer's paintings there is often a darker side, of evidence
of man's negative impact on nature which counteracts the luscious sweetness.
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In one painting a railway cuts through the green and
pleasant Chilterns and perhaps as a result of his experiences in the First
World War: paling fences seem to suggest trench ramparts; garden canes and
fence posts hint at marked graves and wooden cold-frames suggest coffins.
By the end of his career Spencer had becomeregarded as ‘a
national treasure’ – an eccentric, quintessentially English genius – a role he
played up to. At the beginning of the exhibition look out for the old pram with
its load of easel, umbrella and the notice, asking passers-by not to disturb
him while he is painting, which he used to transport his equipment round Cookham.
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HEAVENLY LANDSCAPES
at Compton Verney
Continuing the theme of gardens and landscape, Compton
Verney is also running an exhibition about the internationally renowned landscape
designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Through a series of case studies of his
landscapes in the Midlands, which include Croome, Charlecote Park, Combe Abbey
and of course Compton Verney itself, we can look at how Brown designed his neoclassical
arcadias – his version of heaven, and how they were designed to work in practice.
Brown designed landscapes that could be enjoyed by the wealthy who would drive
round their estates appreciating the vistas at certain points from the height of a carriage.
From the array of paintings, maps and manuals on display we
appreciate the enormous practical tasks that faced Brown – the moving of tons
of earth to create hills, vales and lakes in an age before tractors or JCBs, and
the need for a machine capable of moving semi-mature trees so that Brown's clients
would see the completed designs within their life-times. Much of Brown's success
stemmed from his commercial savvy, efficient accounting and system of demanding
payment at each stage before proceeding to the next part of the work. Since no
landowner wanted to be left with an estate looking like an unfinished building
site Brown always got his money. It is fascinating to study his list of staff and
their wage bills. Look out too for an extract from the Household book of George
Lucy's housekeeper at Charlecote in 1757 which describes how “Mr Brown began to
make alterations upon Wellesbourne Brook”.
Although Brown's mid-Georgian landscapes pretended to be ‘natural’
they were in reality just as artificial as the manicured front gardens of Spencer's
Cookham. There is very little real natural wilderness left in England today, which
reminds me of a rather irreverent joke that my father used
to love to tell: An old and rather curmudgeonly villager was tending his small but
immaculate cottage garden when the vicar passed by. “Well, George,” beamed the vicar:
“You and the good Lord have certainly made this a place of
beauty.” To which George muttered: “You should have seen it when the Lord had
it to himself.”
AM
Stanley Spencer and the English Garden and ‘Capability’ Brown and the
landscapes of Middle England can be seen at
Compton Verney from 25 June - 2 October 2011.
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