Art, Geography and

Landscape Painting and Representation

Geography's early attempt to interpret art was inspired by an overarching pursuit of generalizable rules about landscape taste and national identity. For David Lowenthal and Hugh Prince, John Constable's The Haywain, painted in 1821, exemplified an English devotion to rustic life and landscape. The Haywain was, and arguably still is, a depiction of quintessential England. However, Lowenthal and Prince argued that for every typical English landscape, there was always the aesthetic antithesis—the imposing demonic chimneyscapes of industry, as represented in L. S. Lowry's landscape art. Although Lowenthal and Prince's work on landscape art created important openings for geography, art was deemed to be not much more than a visual archive, a painted record of landscape artifacts. There was little consideration given to artistic style, technique, and genre.

The cultural turn in geography during the mid-1980s addressed this shortcoming in many ways and brought with it fresh insights to the interpretation of art. Inspired by the work of John Berger and Raymond Williams, among others, Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels developed an intellectual history of the landscape concept in European art. They argued for an interpretive method they called “iconography” that allowed students and researchers of landscape to delve into the symbolical meanings represented in art. For Cosgrove and Daniels, it was not just the content of landscape art that was intriguing but also artists' use of color, texture, technique, perspective, and scale that allowed the links to be made between art and broader cultural histories. So, for example, in the interpretation of J. M. W. Turner's 1844 painting Rain, Steam, and Speed, Daniels argued that the artist was not interested in painting a factual local scene but instead was intent on endowing this landscape with ideas of a historical destiny shaped by the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of iconography as an interpretive method is that it does not attempt to reveal a single truth about art; instead, it advocates multiple deconstructions of meaning. Art then becomes best understood as yielding a duplicity of meaning.

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