[In the following review, Bell proclaims Clark to be the best man to teach the English youth to care for the arts and praises his book, Landscape into Art.]

Skillfully manipulated as they have been, these lectures [Landscape into Art]—the first Sir Kenneth Clark has given as Slade Professor at Oxford—remain lectures; and according to Sir Kenneth “the publication of lectures is a well-known form of literary suicide.” All I can say is, the corpse is doing wonderfully well. A good lecture on painting is almost bound to be discursive: unexplored theories and novel comparisons start into the lecturer's mind as he contemplates a slide with which, perhaps, he is illustrating his central theme; and, for a moment, the theme is lost. The new Slade Professor has a central theme, and whether one agrees or disagrees with it is of no great consequence; for the value of a fine critic's comment does not depend on the soundness of his doctrine. What does matter is that Sir Kenneth has at his command four instruments: a turn for historical generalization based on knowledge, the scholar's gift of drawing inferences from apparently disconnected facts and slight indications, expository power and, above all, a love of painting: blest with these, he is the properest man alive to “make our English youth care somewhat for the arts.”

Sir Kenneth Clark is the worthy successor of Roger Fry against whose judgments he is often in rebellion: were he not, he would be an unworthy successor. Both possess that rare gift of “making”—to use Virginia Woolf's phrase—“pictures real and art important”; and if presently I underline the differences in their approach that will be because in so doing I hope to give the reader some idea of the doctrine which underlies these lectures. But what I want to say at once is what the author himself has said emphatically—this book makes no claim to be a history of landscape. That is a book which remains to be written, a book which must be designed and built on historical principles and based on a precise definition. It will not be amiss, I think, to propose here and now a definition of pure landscape-painting and see how far it can be justified by the authoritative opinion and sensitive choice of the Slade Professor.

Pure landscape, it seems to me—and I do not think Sir Kenneth would dissent—is the expression of an emotion, felt for landscape as an end in itself, in terms of landscape. As perfect examples Sung paintings immediately spring to the mind. In these, to be sure, figures occur; but they have little or nothing to do with the emotion or the expression. A hermit or a brace of philosophers at the foot of a waterfall are there merely to give scale to the composition. Chinese art, however, is outside the lecturer's terms of reference, and therefore of ours; we must begin with classical antiquity. Of Hellenistic landscape most of what remains is to be seen at Naples: it is not pure but decorative and symbolical. It is designed to delight villa-owners, partly by charming their eyes with apt forms and gay colours, partly by recalling the pleasures of country-life. Similar considerations invalidate the claim which has been made for those enchanting frescos in the Papal palace at Avignon (circa 1345)—the claim that they are the first pure European landscapes. Assuredly they express delight in the beauty of trees and flowers, but chiefly they are festive commemorations of country ways and country doings. In fact, they have very much the air of having been made by sportsmen for sportsmen. With the Avignon frescos must stand or fall the scenes from the calendar of the Très Riches Heures (circa 1400). That the Limbourg brothers loved country-life these miniatures make deliciously clear; but they are as much concerned with describing the labours of the months as with expressing feelings for nature.

Sir Kenneth Clark groups the works of those medieval artists who gave landscape appreciable importance under the heading, “The Landscape of Symbols”—it must be understood that Sir Kenneth's compartments are elastic. To the mind of the earlier middle ages—till the end of the thirteenth century perhaps—everything in external reality was symbolic of something in ultimate reality: everything on earth was symbolic of something in heaven. Symbolism was the natural language of art, and Byzantine artists invented elegant and handy symbols for almost every object or notion that was likely to occur in any scene they were likely to be called on to depict. These symbols reached the West through illustrated books, and suited painters so well that they continued in use long after technical discoveries had made realism possible. Every student is familiar with the Byzantine symbol for a mountain—a jagged cone: Sir Kenneth reminds us of the exquisite use made of this convention in the fifteenth century (e.g., by Giovanni di Paolo in his St. John the Baptist going into the wilderness) and adds that even towards the end of the sixteenth the art of Greco bears witness to the persistence of Byzantine symbolism. It is, perhaps, in his discussion of symbolic landscape and the landscape of fact that Sir Kenneth's brilliant intellect and delicate perception are seen to greatest advantage; but throughout the first five chapters—the greater part of the book—he contrives to combine scholarship with sensibility, lightness of touch with solidity of erudition, in a manner that keeps the reader constantly delighted and alert. Only when he reaches the nineteenth century does he fail, it seems to me, entirely to convince. He becomes more assertive and less sure of his assertions. Is it that he is more at home with medieval and Renaissance than with modern art? Or is it merely that I cannot bear to hear a word against the Impressionists?

Perhaps I should be well advised to return to my original question: “Who was the first to conceive of landscape as an end in itself—neither symbol nor background?” If I understand him aright, Sir Kenneth would be inclined to reply, Hubert van Eyck, citing the illustrations in the Turin Hours (circa 1415) now alas! all but one destroyed. In these little pictures—of which we have photographs—he reckons the figures subordinate and the legends of no account. He may be right; but there the figures are, and to me they do seem of some account. No, if we are to be allowed to detach landscapes from the figures they support, I shall make claim for Giovanni Bellini's Madonna del prato or his Conversation in the Uffizi. Indeed, it is possible so to detach them, as Sir Kenneth Clark in another place has beautifully shown; also, if these details are to rank as “pure landscape,” the Venetians from the earliest Bellinis to the latest Titians, along with their Umbrian animator, Piero della Francesca, provide us with our first and best school of European landscape-painters. But if by “pure landscape” we mean pictures in which there are no figures or only figures of no importance, these Venetian and Umbrian glories are excluded by definition. And, as no one, I suppose, would wish to drag the pleasing products of the Patinir combine into discussion, I think we must wait for Rubens before acclaiming a masterpiece of pure landscape. With hesitation and handsome apologies Sir Kenneth places him amongst the Fantasts. I have said that his classifications are elastic, but here, perhaps, he tries a pliant material too high. The fact is this mighty master, who with a poet's imagination combines almost supernatural powers of observation and recording, like Shakespeare, defies classification.

Of Poussin and Claude he writes beautifully and, what is more, with originality: the whole chapter on Ideal landscape is admirable. Only, as I have said, when he comes to the nineteenth century does he seem to falter. Sir Kenneth, we know, has been studying Ruskin, and Ruskin, I surmise, has induced an excessive admiration for Turner. The shadow of the great vulgarian casts a blight on the author's vision of a great age; and the defence of Turner becomes a preoccupation—which makes him, unconsciously perhaps, write grudgingly in praise of Constable, harshly of Courbet and coolly of the Impressionists. On these last, by the way, he, like many French scholars, seems doubtful of English influence. May I help him? He writes (page 92):

They (the Impressionists) do not seem to have been interested in Constable, whose work was then disregarded, and whose sketches were not yet visible. We know from Pissarro's letters that they were impressed by Turner. But here again, we must remember that they saw only Turner's big machines, and many of the pictures which we value most highly, like the Evening Star, were only brought up from the cellars of the National Gallery in 1906.

I have it from Simon Bussy, who had it from Camille Pissarro himself, that the picture which impressed him and impressed Sisley was the Frosty Morning—one of the rare pictures by Turner which I, for my part, do value highly. Anyone who cares to visit the National Gallery can see for himself that the foreground is treated in a manner which, with a little good will, might be described as “impressionist”: or rather, “anyone who visited could see,” for whether this or any other picture is on view, and if so, where it is on view, depends, it would seem, on the passing mood and public engagements of the Director. As for Constable, I recall that he is claimed as a patron and precursor—which may imply no more than that he was praised by Delacroix—in an Impressionist manifesto. I cannot recall the date.

On page 53 Sir Kenneth Clark speaks of “the greatest master of untamed landscape,” and it turns out that he is referring to Turner. That made me rub my eyes. When I had rubbed them sufficiently I perceived that the wheel had come full circle, and that our prime authority on painting—for that is what Sir Kenneth is—was in full revolt against his predecessor, Roger Fry. That Ruskin had a hand in the conversion I do not doubt. On page 96 Sir Kenneth says:

Art is concerned with our whole being—our knowledge, our memories, our associations. To confine painting to purely visual sensations is to touch only the surface of our spirits. Perhaps, in the end, the idealist doctrine is right, we are more impressed by concepts than by sensations, as any child's drawing will show. The supreme creation of art is the compelling image.

This I take to be the author's creed. It is the exact opposite of Fry's which was that visual art is concerned with appearance, from which the artist extracts combinations of forms and colours that have a compelling power of their own, and can transport us far beyond this world of concepts and associations into the world of ultimate reality. To use his own words, “we want something added to us, not something that will release what is already there.”

Now Turner, it seems to me, was generally concerned with astonishing the romantic with the sudden and sumptuous revelation of his own feelings. He was concerned with the romantic tourist's reaction to nature. He was what Roger Fry calls a “first-shock artist,” or rather a first-shock picture-maker. For he was furiously professional; and, despite Sir Kenneth's strange tale of the old gentleman poking his head out of the carriage window, in a downpour, to contemplate the subject of Rain, Steam and Speed, and keeping it out for nine minutes (trains go faster now), I sometimes wonder whether Turner had time to contemplate anything deeply. He was too busy “producing.” “If Tom Girtin had lived I should have starved,” he said. Is not that the authentic language of the Philistine? To Turner painting was competitive trade.