Abstract

This book presents the first study of how British landscape painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century depicted common land in England, just as it was being eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. With a cross-disciplinary approach to the subject, mixing art-historical picture analysis with contemporary poems and novels, and the numerous contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of agricultural improvement and new theories of landscape aesthetics, the book shows British landscape artists in a new light, resolutely painting a landscape that was otherwise viewed as being unproductive, outmoded and unsightly. Recasting common land as a recurrent facet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this almost wholly lost landscape looked like in its hey-day.