ABSTRACT
Having arrived at a college of art in 1974 as a geographer with no artistic aspirations but charged with ploughing the furrows I could find between geography and art, I soon discovered that there was another considerable tradition and body of work about the landscape that came from a different perspective from the one I had previously known. Being the only geographer employed as such in an art school meant there was no one to advise. Art schools had often employed anatomists, but this was the first attempt to follow the same idea to benefit those whose inspiration came from the landscape. To a very considerable extent this change of perspective was quite literally true. The cultural landscape I studied as a student depended on the map or plan as its critical method of explication, though accompanied by a good deal of footwork; now I was looking at elevations, at drawings, prints, paintings, photographs or films. The seminal work that kept cropping up here was not Hoskins but Clark – Sir Kenneth Clark’s Landscape intoArtof 1949. This primarily dealt with landscape painting and purported to show the rise to prominence of landscape as a genre of painting in England from the seventeenth century onward. He claimed that landscape as a form was largely a product of the Restoration in England, and came from two primary roots, one in Italy and one in the Netherlands and Flanders. As a more recent overview of landscape in art, largely but not only British, it is difficult to beat the work by Malcolm Andrews (1989 and 1999).
