Turner’s fine study of a shooting party out on the densely wooded escarpment of Otley Chevin, above the river Wharfe in Yorkshire’s West Riding, is one of many works by the artist set on or about a landed estate. Signed and dated 1813, it was painted for Sir William Pilkington, who tradition identifies as the sportsman setting his sights on the woodcock driven into the line of fire by the beater in the undergrowth below.
But rather than his own Chevet Hall property, which lay 20 or so miles south-east, the scene is located on the vast, sprawling lands of Pilkington’s brother-in-law, Walter Fawkes. Sharing dimensions and the same autumnal palette, a companion picture of grouse hunting on the bleak moorland of Beamsley Beacon is set on Fawkes’ Wharfedale estates, too.
Turner had visited Farnley Hall, Fawkes’s main property, since at least 1808, enjoying his patron’s hospitality while essaying a long series of views of the house and grounds (View of Farnley Hall).
What is termed ‘estate portraiture’ was a popular but contentious category of landscape art that formed part of the portfolio of most specialists in the genre.
It was reliable, commission-based, and sometimes lucrative work, Turner commanding the best part of 500 Guineas for his expansive prospect of Raby Castle, in County Durham, the historic seat of the earl of Darlington, who had met the artist at Farnley (Raby Castle).
Partly because it appeared largely commercial in motivation, partly as the taking of a likeness was deemed a merely mechanical act, such pictures did not find favour in academic circles, however. Deemed more an act of servile, rather than creative, imitation, the artist’s role was simply to deceive the eye and flatter the owner. They, in turn, demanded only a careful tabulation of their possessions. Accordingly, Turner’s fellow Royal Academician Henry Fuseli was famously to dismiss such views as ‘mere map-work’, so not ‘art’ as such.
Turner scholars have also argued that the painter needed to free himself from the commercial necessity of undertaking work of this kind to pursue the more personalised vision characteristic of his later, more abstract pictures. But this progressive narrative arguably overlooks the considerable power and scope of Turner’s estate views.
Scenes set on and about landed property were central to Turner’s artistic profile, featuring regularly among works submitted for public exhibition. In fact, such pictures accounted for a third of the painter’s Royal Academy exhibits in the 1810s alone. Their display advertised the painter’s exalted patronage as well as the owner’s taste and encouragement of the fine arts.
Turner’s estate views surveyed a startling variety of geographies and topographies: sites in Scotland as well as England, in northern and southern counties, wooded upland settings and manicured parkland, rural and suburban properties, historic and modern houses. He enlivened these scenes with narrative incident that pointed up the day-to-day management and use of the landscape. Estate workers fell timber or tend grounds. Owners and their families stroll a pathway or take guests out hunting. Such images of labour and leisure projected the good order and prosperity of the landscape under a patron’s stewardship. In alluding to time-honoured traditions of Georgic and pastoral verse, they also served to cast it in an historic and poetic light.
Turner would refer, too, to Old Master tradition; his view of Raby Castle being indebted to Rubens’s magisterial landscapes of his own baronial seat of Het Steen. Showing Darlington’s ancient family seat, set in rolling parkland, against the high hills of Teesdale, Turner clearly thought the allusion to the Flemish master’s panoramic prospects of the Brabant countryside appropriate for a place likened to ‘a great baron’s palace in feudal ages’. Turner set the house well back, choosing instead to foreground the rolling parkland Darlington had purposefully designed for the newly fashionable pursuit of fox hunting.
Turner attended to the history as well as the management and present-day use of the landscape. In his view across the Wharfe towards Farnley, from the slopes of the Chevin, the artist surveys a mixed landscape of river meadows, hedged fields, woodland and moorland. But this is not some timeless rural scene. The rising smoke of the foreground alludes to the industry of an (unseen) waterside cotton mill, placing the estate firmly within the course of everyday events.
While routinely dismissed by contemporary critics and latter-day art historians alike as essentially documentary and largely calculated to compliment the owner of the site depicted, Turner’s estate views are something more than landscapes simply seen. Nor are their meanings tied merely to matters of ancestry and local connection. They are both closely observed and highly inventive. Turner’s views of landed estates marry matters of fact with a broad range of historical, pictorial and poetic allusion to amplify the meaning and significance of the locality depicted.
This article was written by Dr John Bonehill, Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow.