The Fitzwilliam Museum

     On my recent holiday in Cambridge I spent Wednesday morning at the Fitzwilliam Museum.  Here are four paintings from the British Landscape Tradition that caught my eye, by Hockney, Spencer, and Samuel Palmer.

     

Ce qui entend le plus de bêtises dans le monde est peut-être un tableau de musée.

This last painting, ‘View of Lee, North Devon’,1834-5, also known as ‘Autumn Landscape with view to the Sea’ by this deeply mystical artist, has, since the major (and controversial) re-hang of 2023, been accompanied by an information label that chides the artist thus: ‘Palmer’s landscapes show no sign of the industrial age that was making its mark on the environment.  Nor do they register the poverty of agricultural workers, which was worsened by the Poor law, introduced the year this work was made and which sent many in poverty to the Workhouse.’  Why should he?  Artists are under no moral obligation to do so.  To paraphrase a recent article in The Critic: art owes us nothing. 

     Certainly, those self-same criticisms could be levelled at Hockney and Spencer, but for some reason or another they are not so graced.  Hockney, after a teenage flirtation with ‘It’s grim up North’, forsook sooty Bradford for sun-drenched middle-class Los Angeles, and later became a chronicler of haut bourgeois London: aristocrats, fashion designers, writers, photographers, bankers, and the like.  Spenser’s landscapes show very little ‘sign of the industrial age that was making its mark on the environment’.  And a quick survey of the other paintings on display failed to elicit any similar comments.

     What is so threatening in Palmer’s work, to deserve this?  I can only deduce that this was, in fact, a purely arbitrary act, one designed merely to shame and humiliate.  Pour encourager les autres.  Such reductive comments fail, at a profound level, to understand to the creative process itself.  A work of art is a complex and messy thing, whose origins lie a web of often conflicting motivations often as not from the sub-conscious.  A definitive explanation of a painting is beyond us all whether we have a piece of paper to say we are qualified, or not.  At some level we are confronted with a mystery.