British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, 1750–1950 is the catalogue of the first major exhibition installed at the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent—an occasion for continentals to examine a distinctly British artistic tradition. Conceived by the museum’s director, Robert Hoozee, the exhibition aimed to trace and highlight links between works from the mid-eighteenth century (when, for the first time, native artists publicly staked out their own reputation) through to the 1950s (at which point Modernism overrode the notion of a national tradition).

In his opening essay Hoozee explains the organizing principle of the exhibition. Two long essays follow, “Between the Meticulous and the Mad” by Timothy Hyman and “Visions of Landscape” by John Gage, that discuss the various themes and issues clustering around the notion of British art. The catalogue is then divided into three main sections: “Society,” “Landscape,” and “The Visionary.” Each of the sections begins with a brief introduction by Hoozee explaining the selection of works, and is followed by focused essays on key works or series of works that in some sense represent the whole. All the works are then discussed in individual entries. The essays and entries were written by Hyman and Gage, along with eighteen other historians of British art.

At issue is the idea of “Britishness,” which here is sought on the margins of a traditional art-historical narrative that embraces the full range of genres and the complex exchange between institutions and individual artists. As the exhibition ventures off the mainstream account of British art, it makes no claim for a historical sequence, but rather for a series of ideological moments that expose shared affinities. Priority is given to works created outside the institutional parameter of the Royal Academy, and often described as peripheral, idiosyncratic, unique. The driving force of British Vision is the same one that preoccupied Nicholas Pevsner more than fifty years ago in The Englishness of English Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), and—as there—the issue is addressed from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Hoozee prefers the more inclusive term “Britishness,” which gives his inquiry greater scope for defining those qualities and formal traits regarded as intrinsic and enduring. In effect, Hoozee attempts to restyle what was long deemed a defect into a distinction, as works formerly maligned as provincial are eulogized as marginal in a revisionist’s riposte to Roger Fry’s gloomy characterization of the British national style as suffering from provinciality.

While Hoozee finds the notion of a National School outdated, he nonetheless takes it as a starting point in choosing paintings, photographs, and some few sculptures to argue for his thesis that two distinctive, though often converging aspects, characterize British art: observation—a devotion to detailed empirical delineation; and imagination—an appetite for visionary flights of fancy. Prominence is given to certain key artists and movements by charting affinities: with the former, in works by William Hogarth, John Constable, the Pre-Raphaelites, Stanley Spencer, Lucien Freud, and Frank Auerbach; with the latter, in works by William Blake, again the Pre-Raphaelites, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, and Paul Nash. In the end, this dialectical notion of a Britishness that veers toward either the microscopic or cosmic extremes is uncomfortably and unconvincingly imposed on what actually is a very interesting collection of works.

As an informative supplement to an exhibition that included a number of stunning works, the handsome catalogue doubtless fulfills its function. Yet the catalogue not only fails to convey the full impact of the exhibition’s dramatic voyage through fourteen rooms of calculated juxtapositions, but subsumes the images under the rubrics of “Society,” “Landscape,” and “The Visionary,” categories which are, in the case of many works, ill-fitting despite their ambiguity. Individual catalogue entries are informative, as are the extended contextual commentaries devoted to thirteen key works, but they do not add up to a compelling narrative. As an autonomous publication rather than as an adjunct to an exhibition (where scale and sequence are primary factors), the catalogue is not persuasive, and pales in comparison to The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940 (David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell, eds., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), a compendium of essays which, though narrower in compass, deals with the same issues.

British Vision proffers a very selective view of British art that, in sidestepping the mainstream, omits the canonical British genre of portraiture, and with it Sir Joshua Reynolds. Overlooked as well are those essentially British genres of animal and sporting art—no Philip Reinagle, Ben Marshall, or Edwin Landseer. The viewer is left to only imagine a confrontation of Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat ([1854–55, 1856] which, despite its painstaking details, is described as “visionary”) and a painting by Landseer such as Monarch of the Glen (1851). A few works by George Stubbs are included, although curiously Eclipse at Newmarket with a Groom and Jockey (1770) and two anatomical studies of a horse appear in the “Landscape” section.

Timothy Hyman’s introductory essay, “Between the Meticulous and the Mad,” focuses on works by artists who incline toward the compulsive, humorous, and eccentric, often funneling the driving notions of observation and imagination to the extremes of finicky and fantastic. Singled out for special merit are particularly unconventional works—Blake’s engraving of the Laocoön group (ca. 1825), which is enveloped within a commentary on art, religion, and commerce, and Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (1855–64)—examples in line with Hyman’s penchant for marginality and excess (cf., his Carnivalesque [London: Haywood Gallery, 2000]). His promotion of David Jones, Derwent Lees, and Dadd might suggest that a requisite for the imaginative sublime is a mental breakdown or a diagnosis as criminally insane.

On the plus side, “British Humour” is a lively sub-section under “Society,” and includes works ranging from Hogarth to Aubrey Beardsley. While well-known pieces by the former are the most numerous, in his second essay Hyman focuses upon the extraordinarily imaginative James Gillray. Unfortunately the spotlight is on his most anarchic works, from the years just before he went mad (ergo another link forged). Gillray’s disorderly drawing The Faro Table (ca. 1800) is tendentiously compared with Thomas Rowlandson’s The Exhibition ‘Stare’ Case, Somerset House (ca. 1800) when a more equitable comparison might have been made with Rowlandson’s Gaming Table at Devonshire House (1790) or A Kick-up at a Hazard Table (1790). A more intriguing work by Gillray, especially for its painterly quality, is the small and macabre Voltaire Instructing the Infant Jacobinism (ca. 1800), atypically rendered in the medium of oil. This little gem might be better suited to the catalogue’s “Visionary” section than to a disquisition on “British Humour,” as might Fuseli’s bizarre drawings of bare-breasted women with kinky hairdos. Such works may seem humorous today, but Fuseli’s contemporaries considered his work phantasmagoric and sublime. Curiously, the accompanying text often insists on British humorists’ affinities with foreign artists. For instance, Beardsley is compared to Félicien Rops, when his work might better be tied to Rowlandson’s erotica, providing the perfect segue to the section’s cathartic tailpiece—Beardsley’s scatological Lysistrata Defending the Acropolis (1896)—with a piss-pot emptied and a female farting.

“Modern Life,” the last of the three sub-categories under “Society,” takes us from dour urban scenes by Walter Sickert, to semi-aggressive war imagery by Paul Nash, to industrialized landscapes by Lawrence Lowry, and on to various forms of abstraction (Wyndham Lewis et al.) that cautiously kowtow to prevailing modernist movements. The latest works actually date from beyond the 1950 time frame, but succeed in twining strands of British literary and graphic tradition in Richard Hamilton’s illustrations of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1948–49) and David Hockney’s update of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1961–63).

The third introductory essay, “Visions of Landscape” by John Gage, is singularly unpolemical compared to Hyman’s, and seems at odds with the exhibition’s revisionist aims. Gage’s narrative of British landscape tradition addresses the significance of landscape gardening, the aesthetic of the picturesque, and the roles of the Academy, industrialization, and religious sentiment as expressed in depictions of nature. In a succinct coda, “The Language of Trees,” Gage deftly ties the poetic sentiment of George Herbert (referenced in a painting by William Dyce) to nature studies by John Linnell, Samuel Palmer, Thomas Gainsborough, and Lucien Freud, then roots emblematic and anthropomorphic depictions of trees in Britain’s economic, political, and social landscape, where the slow-growing oak contends with the upstart pine. This discussion is concise, comprehensive, comprehensible, and historically grounded.

While the outline of Gage’s essay has little bearing on the organization of the landscape entries, very welcome in the sub-section “Points of View” is the priority given to paintings in watercolor, a medium that remained on the fringe of Royal Academy acceptance because of its association with topography. Here, in works not often seen, are masterly renderings of space and land by Alexander Cozens, Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, Alfred William Hunt et al., executed with incredible economy. The “Points of View,” however, sometimes seem to be those of the curator rather than the landscape painters. For example, the inclusion of a very cursory sketch, one of Turner’s many “color beginnings,” unjustly skews the work as confrontational in the context of the accomplished watercolors that precede it and of Hunt’s meticulous renderings and Roger Fenton’s detailed albumen prints of the Middle East that follow.

In keeping with the curator’s penchant for atypical works, the second sub-section, “Everyday Landscapes,” features Constable’s Flatford Mill (1817), the only one of his large-scale paintings done mostly from nature, and one that diverges from his usual practice of life sketches reworked in the studio. A variety of close-up cloud, rock, and tree studies (by Cozens, William Henry Fox Talbot, John Ruskin, and others) are coherently grouped under a third sub-section, “Atmosphere and Detail.” However, An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead (1852–53, 1855), by Ford Maddox Brown, as well as other paintings in this section are clearly misplaced. The final sub-section, “Modern Landscape,” is perhaps the most daunting in its rationale—especially with its inclusion of Victor Pasmore’s The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White (1851–52), an abstract composition of striated swirls. Also included here are a few examples of sculpture: Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form (1961), the commentary on which would have benefited from a reference to England’s prehistoric West Country sites (cf., Sam Smiles, “Equivalents for the Megaliths: Prehistory and English Culture, 1920–50,” in The Geographies of Englishness), and two examples of reclining figures by Henry Moore.

Blake, as might be expected, is presented as the bedrock of the visionary, phantasmagoric, and apocalyptic mode, to which Fuseli, George Romney, Samuel Palmer, John Martin, and the Pre-Raphaelite/cum mannerist extravaganzas by Edward Burne-Jones are also predisposed. But it begs the question to include a little understood interior by Turner (one of a cache of unfinished works that are part of the Turner Bequest), here claiming that a radiant swath of white pigment emerging from an indistinct dark surround represents “a state of visionary flux.” More to the point is the idiosyncratic imagery of Spencer, a key link in the Blakean chain to Francis Bacon. That eighteen paintings by Spencer are reproduced—more than by any other artist—is an acknowledgment that his artistic persona is the epitome and embodiment of a uniquely British aesthetic sensibility.

The exhibition British Vision may well have succeeded in visually conveying the notion that at certain moments during the course of two centuries elements of continuity in British art are apparent, and that these are characterized by alternately empirical, satirical, and fantastical mindsets. But it would take considerable revision before the exhibition catalogue could convince the reader of that same claim.