man, the painter with the gardener, by Baron who engraved the former’s work. “I confine the sublime”, wrote Richardson, “to history and portrait painting”. The struggle to elevate landscape painting was handicapped in England by its associations with Dutch realism and proprietary topography. Even if Vertue’s hasardous associations of Dahl and Titian, Strester and Michelangelo, Charles Jervas and Raphael do more credit to the optimism than to the judgement of the age, Walpole is more discerning. He shows how taking after Continental artists determines the development of the English ones. “Our painters”, he wrote, “draw rocks and precipes and castellated mountains, because Vergil gasped for breath at Naples, and Salvator wandered amidst Alps and Apennines.” After noting a resemblance between Lambert and Salvator Rosa he sensibly came down on the side of his faithful and unpretentious renderings of English rural scenes. Regardless of the painters and their attempts to align themselves to the Continentals, the one element that marks profoundly this period is the oscillation of landscape between the ideal and the topographical. The Jan Wyck-Siberechts tradition continued to flourish in topographical painting. The formula of a wide panoramic view, with or without trees “en coulisse”, and the horizon at the level of a prospect piece taken from a hill vied in popularity with the bird’s eye view favoured by Knyff, in which less sky is shown. In the first half of the century panoramas of famous or frequented excursion scenes were already in considerable demand. The main outlines of British topographical painting from Hollar and Hendrick Dankerts to Peter de Wint and Turner could be traced in an exhibition of paintings of two of the most famous prospects of the environs of London, those from Greenwich Hill and Richmond Hill. Animal painting of the type t...
