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The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design by David Watkin (review)

In examining the writings of Ruskin, Elizabeth Heisinger does more than present a descriptive catalogue of development. She also engages in a sometimes complex. but always fascinating journey into the relationship between the forms and the styles of Ruskin's writings and his aesthetic and critical ideas. These ideas are not passively conveyed by Ruskin's writings, but as they develop, they determine the style of that writing itself, which in turn becomes a contribution to Ruskin's wider cultural aims. Essential both to Ruskin's aesthetics and to his writing style is his critique of a romantic imagination which over-emphasized the artist's privileged mode of perception. Ruskin rejects the notion of a privileged perception and its accompanying experience of the Sublime as something independent of cultural associations. Rather, he understands the perception of landscape, in real life or in painting, as a kind ofvisual thinking where ideas are implicit within the act of seeing. In particular, Ruskin is concerned with how the spectator looks at landscape and with the perceptual processes that give rise to the 'beholder's art'. Germane to the beholder's way of seeing landscapes are theexperiences of travel, common to the middle class spectator of the time. 'Excursive sight' and its emphasis on the picturesque informs a particular way of viewing landscape which Ruskin came to regard as being as valid and expressive as the artist's Sublime. HeIsinger shows how the notion of perception-as-thought is further developed with Ruskin's claim that painting is a language which can be read. He brings together 'excursive sight', the traveller's way of seeing landscape, with associative reading. Such associative reading refers to how ideas are generated in 'an exercise of imagination' by formal properties, such as the use of space by Turner. Turner's space leads to an active and dynamic kind of viewing which is associative and is therefore accompanied by an increased attention to art as a variety of symbolic language. HeIsinger then traces Ruskin's increasing concern with pictorial and architectural iconography. Ruskin, for example, used Christian exegesis as a model for the spectator's encounter with symbolism in art. A further development was Ruskin's use of historical philology and of varied historical sources, secular as well as Christian, as a means to interpret symbolic meaning. Ruskin's exploration of the myriad of historical and cultural meanings that can be 'mined' from visual motifs led to a fundamental influence on his own writings and hence the 'critic's art'. Heisinger demonstrates with acuity how Ruskin developed an emblematic prose, which by its imagery, metaphor and excursive language created, in itself, imaginative perception as a powerful critical method for revealing the expressive and symbolic processes whereby human experiences are elaborated into visual emblems. Such a brief summary does not, of course, do Heisinger's bookjustice. Describing her book as a kind of Ruskinian journey, Heisinger suggests that,like ajourney, the ground covered will be more interesting than any mere summary or map. This is certainly the case, and like a journey, its full richness is perhaps the better appreciated when the journey is completed. That richness comes in part from Heisinger's scholarship and from her detailed account of the historical and cultural contexts which influenced Ruskin's developing ideas and hence his method of writing. In particular, her account of Ruskin's approach to the work of Turner is one of the landmarks of this elegant book.