BOOKS & ARTSenough to prove anything other than
his bravery, dying at 24; but his short
life provides a perfect way into the
naval and domestic politics of the age.
During his years at sea he was constant-
ly badgering his brother with letters, and
in them are mirrored the assumptions and
preoccupations of Britain’s ruling class in
the last days before war with revolution-
ary and Napoleonic France would demand
more of its leaders than a Lord North or
a Rodney could ever have provided.
It cannot always be easy to co-author
a book, but Resolution is a pretty seam-
less performance. It is fair and balanced
in its judgments, authoritative in its han-
dling of all naval aspects, and as comfort-
able with the aristocratic world of Belvoir,
Newmarket and the gaming table as it is with
the quarterdeck.Romancing the stones
Susan Owens
British Art:
Ancient Landscapes
by Sam Smiles
Paul Holberton Publishing, £25, pp. 120
If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have
had a magnetic attraction for generations of
artists, it is perhaps because they have long
been seen as works of art themselves. ‘The
whole temple of Avebury may be consider’d
as a picture’, enthused the antiquary William
Stukeley in 1743, while ‘my God how sculp-
tural’ was Barbara Hepworth’s response to
Cornish sites such as the Mên-an-Tol and
the Nine Maidens which she encountered
after moving to St Ives in 1939. The creative
tension between artists and these mysteri-
ous presences in the landscape is the subject
of Sam Smiles’s engaging book British Art:
Ancient Landscapes, published to accom-
pany an exhibition at the Salisbury Museum
(until 3 September).
Taking us on a tour of sites, albeit one in
which we repeatedly find ourselves back at
Stonehenge, Smiles demonstrates how all
artists reinvent ancient monuments. Some,
he tells us, do it more audaciously than oth-
ers: oddly, it is in a drawing purporting to be
a sober work of documentation that we see
the most outlandish results of imaginative
engagement. Stukeley’s theory that Avebury
had been a Druidic temple got the better of
his judgment; manipulating the landscape to
fit his notion of serpentine avenues he made
the complex appear ‘more snake-like than
his own surveys had revealed’.
It wasn’t long before megalithic struc-
tures began to feature in ambitious paintings
teeming with bards and druids, but in the late
18th century they were regarded as portable
feasts. Would the grandeur of Stonehenge,
wondered Thomas Jones, be lessened if it
were found ‘amidst high rocks, lofty moun-
tains and hanging Woods?’ As Smiles wryly
observes, he answers his own question with
‘The Bard’ of 1774, a stagey composition in
which the relocated standing stones become
a diminutive chorus line, dwarfed by huge
blasted trees and rocky outcrops.
But it was the Romantics, Smiles tells
us, who first embraced Stonehenge. And if
they did not play as fast and loose with the
appearance of the megaliths as their imme-
diate predecessors, they compensated with
theatrical weather conditions. John Consta-ble dismissed plain topographical views of
Stonehenge — ‘Its literal representation as a
“stone quarry” has been often enough done’
— and proposed a ‘poetical’ one instead.
His resulting watercolour, based on a tiny,
meticulous pencil sketch done years before,
is dominated by an exhilarating weather-
drama taking place in the sky. From a safe
distance, J. M. W. Turner depicts the same
scene littered with the bodies of a shepherd
and his flock, victims of an electrical storm
that is turning the sarsens into incandescent
torches.
Smiles points out that few Victorians
tackled such subjects, but that with the return
of the Romantic spirit in the early 20th cen-
tury standing stones and hill figures again
loomed large, this time in the imaginations
of Hepworth, John Piper, Paul Nash andEric Ravilious, all of whom were attuned
to a mysterious lifeforce simmering away in
ancient sites.
This renewed interest happened to coin-
cide with a period of serious archaeological
research, resulting in some friction between
artists and experts. Smiles quotes Piper imag-
ining himself being ticked off for his ‘drunk
and disorderly’ artistic response to the
atmosphere of Stonehenge, while in 1927,
Nash, for whom the sarsens were genii loci,
crossly proposed that anyone ‘airing archi-
ological [sic] small talk should be fined five
shillings and hustled into the highway with
the utmost ignominy conceivable’.
This beautifully illustrated book allows
us to catch artists in the act of negotiat-
ing ancient monuments. For his advertising
poster for Shell, Edward McKnight Kauffer
pulls up in his car, shining his headlights on
the Stonehenge sarsens, and Henry Moore,
making a series of lithographs in 1973, gets so
close that they block out the light. And while
Ithell Colquhoun brought various Cornish
standing stones together in her imagination
for one supercharged painting, Richard Long
coolly photographed them in passing; it was
his walk, he maintained, that was the primary
work of art.
By the time Smiles brings us to
Jeremy Deller, the artist’s work ‘Sacrilege’
— the bouncy-castle Stonehenge that went
on tour as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympi-
ad — seems not so sacrilegious after all, but
rather part of an ongoing tradition of art-
ists’ re-imaginings in which taking liberties
is standard.Hepworth, Piper and Nash were
attuned to a mysterious lifeforce
simmering away in ancient sitesTurner’s
Stonehenge
is strewn with
the bodies
of sheep and
their shepherd,
victims of an
electrical storm