ABSTRACT
In recent years the late Victorian bourgeois impulse to return to rusticity has been exhaustively studied. The arts and crafts movement, utopian socialism, garden suburbs and other manifestations of the rearguard tendencies were largely motivated by anti-urban, anti-industrial convictions. The status of craft knowledge, often specialist and technical, belied its cultural construction and the extent to which, by selective use of the past, it was involved in self-validation. Alfred East's landscapes painted in Spain and Italy gave access to alternative traditions in a context in which Englishness was much more expansive than is sometimes claimed. It became easier on these foreign shores to reclaim the lotus land peopled by nymphs and rustics. Italianate motifs do not constitute the dominant strand in contemporary landscape painting. It was to the Cotswolds and the valley of the Ouse that East was constantly recalled by his critics.
