gainsborough

SECULARIZATION & MODERNITY
RESOURCES

The Harvest-Wagon

1767

Thomas Gainsborough

One of the more distinctive manifestations of secularization within art history involves the changing relation between landscape and religious/biblical motifs. In the later fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth, landscape enters religious painting and so pushes its iconic modes towards a more “realist” approach that embeds biblical figures within a three-dimensional setting. An example might be the Venetian painter, Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà (~ 1501). The complex background cityscape in that painting constitutes a significant development over the minimalist background landscape of Bellini’s 1467 rendition of the same motif. – Art historians frequently comment on the gradual disappearance of biblical motifs and the narratives attaching to them from landscapes beginning in seventeenth-century painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin. For an example of how the landscape, characteristically flanked by vast trees (coulisses) now dwarfs the biblical reference, see Lorrain’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” (early 1640s). By the eighteenth century, then, the landscape within this genre has itself become an encrypted kind of narrative in its own right. For examples we turn to the later work of England’s major eighteenth-century painter, Thomas Gainsborough.

About Gainsborough’s “The Harvest Wagon” (1767), John Barrell writes as follows: “I am suggesting then that we should understand the figures in the landscapes of Gainsborough's Bath period in the light of the tradition of Gay; and a glance at the grandest of Gainsborough's landscape compositions of that period — The Harvest Wagon, of 1767—will make the point clear. The wagon appears to be conveying a group of peasants, men and women, to the feast which, celebrates the end of the harvest, and which is so important in the mythology of the `moral economy' of the eighteenth century and before, as numerous pastoral and semi-pastoral poems of the eighteenth century will attest: it is the occasion, according to whom you believe, at which the essential solidarity of the English rural community is confirmed, as landlord, tenant and laborer sit together in a spontaneous celebration whose freedom is uninhibited by any obtrusive sense of social division; or at which that division is aggressively confirmed by the knowledge of everyone present that this is a once-a-year occasion, and that the laborer is being bribed by beer and frumenty to accept next day the same obligations and the same discipline at the hands of his masters as he has accepted throughout the grueling weeks of the harvest, and throughout the whole year. The wagon is receding along a country lane, but has stopped briefly to take on board a country girl who is being lifted into the cart by a helpful laborer. In the wagon itself sit two other country girls, attractive, and attractively dressed for the occasion; and behind them two clowns, on their feet, are struggling over what John Hayes demurely calls a ‘water-bottle’ but which certainly contains something stronger.

The grouping of the figures is generally agreed to be taken from an engraving of Rubens's Descent from the Cross, which Gainsborough had copied in the early 1760s, and yet when comparing the one with the other we may be struck as much by the contrast between the two compositions as by their similarity. There is, it is true, the same vertical arrangement of the figures, but, as its title implies, in the Rubens the pervasive movement is downward, as the dead weight of Christ's body is gently lowered by those above him and gently supported by those below. In Gainsborough's the vertical composition points emphatically upward: one of the struggling clowns strains upwards and backwards, the angle of body recapitulated in the rake that is resting on his shoulders, as he tries to bend away, and so to lift the bottle out of reach of his rival whose arms are extended upwards to insist on his turn. – In a later painting by the same title (from 1784-85), “’the vitality of the figures has been transferred to the landscape, and it is worth asking why it has been felt necessary to take it away from the figures.” A detailed analysis of this painting suggests that a new, “essentially domestic” kind of pastoral is here emerging. “It celebrates no longer the imagined vitality of the rural community, but the imagined peace of a properly conducted family life.” John Barrell goes on to note that Gainsborough’s greater emphasis on social decorum and domestic propriety in his later landscapes was able to find buyers for these canvases, which had eluded him for his more exuberant and heterodox earlier works.

From John Barrell, The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), pp. 61-2; 68-9.