St Barbe's The Life of the Fields is part social history, part call for action , all wrapped up in a broad survey of agricultural landscape art over the last hundred years. One of the main problems which has to deal with is that we inevitably view rural images as, at best, nostalgic and, at worse, twee. So, on the surface this looks like a show dedicated to safe, old-fashioned images which have more in common with the nineteenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The intention is a history of the visual representation of agricultural since the First World War which tackles questions of changing farming practices and changing attitudes to the countryside. The curators are determined to make you look behind the cliches and the prejudices and see these images as both authentic and important. I am not sure it entirely succeeds in its intention, but it is varied, wide-ranging and very satisfying show.
The exhibition sets out its stall as social commentary with divisions into sections like farming practices and rural architecture, and ends with a group of contemporary works which represent farming today. It takes a deliberately wide definition of visual culture to incorporate Charles Tunnicliffe's Ladybird book illustrations and propaganda posters like Frank Newbould's Your Britain, Fight for it Now, as well as significant numbers of printworks from Clare Leighton's wood engraving January to John Nash's humorous lithograph Harvesting, produced as part of the School Prints initiative. There is a good balance of familiar and less familiar names: George Clausen and Lauren Knight sit alongside James Bateman and Thomas Hennell - certainly new to me. Equally, because this is thematically curated there is a huge range of juxtaposed styles. John Arnesby Brown's Millet-influenced Spring has Romanticism in its lowering sky; Eric Ravilious transforms the Downs in Winter with a undulating fluidity in which the roller looks almost like a ship adrift at sea; Frances Hodgkins imbues the Broken Tractor with organic surrealism; Julian Opie reduces fields to minimalist linearity.
The exhibition is very good at contextualising these disparate representations, both in history and in personal experience. Some of the producers were themselves from a rural background, others found themselves in the countryside by chance - Ethelbert White was sent to work on the land in Devon as a conscientious objector - and for many more it was a place of retreat. Harry Epworth Allen was a World War One amputee who travelled round by bus; Kechie Tennent and her husband, who had been imprisoned as a 'conchie', retreated to rural Norfolk after his release; Stanley Anderson moved out of London to escape the Blitz. The importance of agricultural production during both world wars gets good coverage. St Barbe can claim to have pioneered the rediscovery of Evelyn Dunbar with their 2006 exhibition and she is represented here with A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Randolph Schwabe shows the Land Army working alongside German PoWs; Edward Burra has soldiers bringing in the harvest. Equally, the wartime drive for productivity can be seen in the increased presence of mechanisation in post-War works like Norman Neasom's Woolas Hall.
The great irony of the exhibition is that all these works are painted at a time which postdates the golden age of agriculture and the great population shift from country to town. They are all intrinsically nostalgic even when purporting to be factual observation, and in their determination to be unsentimental there is I think an under-acknowledgement of this on the part of the curators. The long legacy of landscape painting underpins much of the work here, sometimes overtly, as in Robin Tanner's debt to Samuel Palmer, often obliquely. The huge sky with its churning clouds and Jesus-rayed sun in James Lynch's The Last of the Harvest, Mere Down is evocatively elegiac, and not just because it tops industrialised rectilinear fields. The lone figure in Tennant's Ploughing bent effortfully into his work at the same angle as the tree behind, is a figure from Hardy or Clare, or even a Medieval Book of Hours.
I suspect for many visitors, the factual, socio-historical context will be an appealing and instructive way into the art, so I am not going to moan too much. This is a thoroughly-researched and endlessly interesting survey (there is also an accompanying catalogue). It will introduce you to artists, stir memories, evoke emotions and stimulate you to make connections. The time and effort spent by the curators should not be underestimated. Once again, a 'provincial' museum has put on an exhibition which everyone deserves the chance to see.
