Indoor Spaces for Outdoor Minds: Landscape Artists’ Studios in London, 1780–1850

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapes, which appear today reproduced on items from cushions to biscuit tins, have become synonymous with the British countryside but are divorced from the context of their creation. After the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768, London experienced an ‘age of exhibitions’, a new social context that changed the artistic economy from a monopoly of the wealthy to an experience for the masses. Artists’ roles, motivations, and inspiration changed in response. As did their studios, which adapted to accommodate patrons, exhibit work, and mould their professional identities. The studio-cum- galleries of landscape artists have been eclipsed by the equivalent spaces of portrait painters of the period. This thesis explores what scholarship has overlooked: the irony that rural landscapes were being painted in urban London, the outside world being created inside the limits of a room.

This thesis sits at a crossroads between the historiography of landscape in Britain and the sociological examination of the artist’s studio: utilising multi-scalar, mixed methodologies, starting with the landscape artist community on a macro level and, metaphorically speaking, zooming in to the studio with each chapter.

Employing mass data and Geographic Information System mapping produced data which defies the scholarly narrative that there were only a handful of professional landscape artists, and thus facilitates a ground-breaking understanding of their presence in London between 1780 and 1850. The thesis demonstrates that landscape artists’ studios formed a micro-culture within the London art world. The studio was a manifestation of an urban-rural dichotomy which saw landscape artists equally reliant on and restricted by their urban environment in the construction and reception of their works. By building a visual, theoretical, material, and data driven understanding of the landscape artist’s studio, this research provides a revised context for the creation of landscapes and how we interpret them today.