Abstract

Waites co-curated (with curatorial staff at The Collection/Usher Gallery Lincoln) a major exhibition on the early nineteenth century landscape painter, Peter DeWint, entitled ‘Peter DeWint 1784-1849: For the Common Observer of Life and Art’. The exhibition ran from May to August 2007, at the new Lincolnshire City and County Museum, ‘The Collection’. As well as using works from the Usher Gallery collection, the exhibition included comparative works from national, international and private collections. A fully illustrated, scholarly written exhibition monograph was published by the international publisher, Lund Humphries, in May 2007. The catalogue is the first scholarly monograph on DeWint for twenty five years. Waites’s chapter contribution assesses DeWint’s depictions of what appear to be unenclosed arable fields in Lincolnshire, notable for their panoramic articulations of space and light. The chapter examines these paintings in the context of the history of Parliamentary Enclosure in Lincolnshire, and considers DeWint’s own aesthetic inclinations for open spaces against emerging, cultural feelings of loss and nostalgia as the common field landscape and its old ways of life were disappearing. The exhibition and book were reviewed in Apollo (July 2007) and The Burlington Magazine (Vol. CXLIX, No. 1253, August 2007).