Summary

Oil painting on canvas, View of Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, by Richard Bankes Harraden (1778 - Cambridge 1862), signed and dated on reverse: R. Harraden Pinxt. 1822. A view of a landscape park with country house in the background and cows in foreground.

Full description

A modestly sized oil painting by the Cambridge artist Richard Bankes Harraden (1778–1862) has recently been acquired for Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire from the dealer Miles Wynn Cato for £1,200 with funds from Wimpole and from gifts and bequests (previously auctioned at Sotheby’s Olympia, London, 2 July 2003, Lot 113). This unpretentious but charming picture, painted in 1822, furnishes us with a unique view of the landscape park to the north of Wimpole and shows, more clearly than can a succession of plans or maps, the sum of approximately 200 years of changing fashion in landscape design. All other surviving topographical views of the park look the other way, that is from the house northwards to Johnson’s Hill and the 18th-century Gothic Folly or sham castle that sits as an eye-catcher below its crest. In Harraden’s painting, the house itself -its wings partly hidden by the blocks of trees which were planted purposely to frame the view to the north -has become the incident in the landscape. ‘This eye-trap’, as it was described, was planted by Robert Greening, who, in the mid 1750s, first began to loosen the formality of Wimpole’s 17th-century gardens and parkland planting. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown continued the process in the late 1760s and early 1770s, and it is essentially his landscape matured that we can enjoy in this painting. Harraden’s view is fuller and more wooded than those which, drawn nearly fifty years earlier by Lady Amabel Polwarth, the daughter of Philip, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke, found their way onto the celebrated ‘Green Frog’ dessert service made by Wedgwood for Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia in 1774. Harraden must have stationed himself immediately below the folly on Johnson’s Hill. The land in the foreground falls away to the serpentine lower lake which Brown created by broadening the small river, the Holden Dene, which drops through the estate from west to east. The upper lake, which he created by throwing together two 17th-century fish ponds, can just be glimpsed between the branches of the trees at the far right of the picture. The effect from the artist’s vantage point is of a natural, sinuous river -exactly what Brown intended. The odd tree survives from an avenue that once ran straight as an arrow from house to hill, but the tree planting is in the main arranged in Brown’s characteristic clumps. The brighter, bluer green of the tree canopy towards the right of the painting marks the position of the plane trees that Brown planted on the approach to the Chinese bridge and dam that were built between the two bodies of water. The presence of the cattle in the foreground is telling too. Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke (1757-1834) was an enthusiastic improving landlord and a significant player in the late Georgian ‘high farming’ movement, in 1814 becoming the first President of the Board of Agriculture. Among the changes that he made to the management of his estate at Wimpole was the introduction of Leicester Longhorn cattle, an improved cross-breed developed for meat production by Robert Bakewell (1725-95). They replaced the sheep that, together with deer, had traditionally grazed the park and which, probably because of the estate’s overburden of then poorly drained gault clay, were prone to foot rot. Diseased deer were also culled and a new herd introduced. It is deer that otherwise appear in most views of Wimpole, and, despite complaining about the proximity to the house of sheep, it is deer that the landscape gardener Humphry Repton shows in his watercolour views of the park. Richard Bankes Harraden’s bucolic view of Wimpole and its park. By the end of the 19th century the country’s near hundred-year-long-enthusiasm for Longhorn cattle had peaked. A leaner meat was wanted and other, industrially produced, materials were available to substitute for the animal horn that had been so important for the making, for example, of buttons for garments and handles for cutlery. This painting also, then, captures a moment in the history of cattle farming. In the heat of the so-called ‘Picturesque Controversy’ of the dying years of the 18th century, Repton came under critical fire. The chief protagonists of the debate, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, dismissed him as a ‘servilec follower’ of Brown. Repton was keen to distance himself from the great man’s legacy, and in the introduction to his 1801 Red Book proposals for Wimpole, wrote: ‘It is called natural, but to me it has ever appeared unnatural that a palace should rise immediately out of a sheep pasture’. How much better it would be, he argued, if there were to be a railinged flower terrace around the house which could separate the realms of horticulture and animal husbandry. The 3rd Earl was not so sure -in the margin of Repton’s flashy Red Book he, or perhaps his Countess, scribbled: ‘Expensive and the appearance doubtful’. Repton’s proposal in any event signalled that fashion had turned full circle: sixty years earlier, when informality and the pursuit of the natural was all the rage, Alexander Pope had observed in his wry verse Of the Use of Riches: an Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (1731): ‘Tir’d of the Scene Parterres and Fountains yield, He finds at last he better likes a Field.’ One other view of Wimpole by Richard Bankes Harraden survives -a coloured lithograph, printed by Englemann, Graf, Conde & Co. It is a similarly unconventional composition, for it shows the Gothic Folly not as a distant eye-catcher in the landscape, with its fair face of weathered clunch on show to the world, but rather from within its curtain wall. It is a romantic, bosky view, in which a long-lost set of stairs leading to the entrance of the tower can be seen. An internal flight led up to a prospect room or belvedere which boasted no fewer than five windows commanding a sweeping panorama from south-east to south-west. Richard Bankes Harraden spent most of his life in Cambridge, only some eight miles from Wimpole. He was more accomplished as an artist than was his father Richard Harraden (1756–1838), in collaboration with whom he first engraved aquatints for Thomas Girtin’s Views of Paris. They worked together too on their own publications: Costume of the Various Orders in the University (1803-05) and Cantabrigia Depicta (1809-11), which contained a series of picturesque views of the University of Cambridge; various guides to the city followed. Richard Bankes Harraden’s facility as a topographical artist was recognised in his membership of the Society of British Artists from 1824 to 1849. Numerous examples of Richard Bankes Harraden’s watercolours of Cambridge, for which he is most noted, can be found in the 1st Lord Fairhaven’s collection at Anglesey Abbey. How he must have delighted in his design of two further items that also survive in the collection there: an invitation to a great patriotic dinner on 28 June 1838 on Parker’s Piece, Cambridge, in commemoration of Queen Victoria’s coronation; and a proof copy of a coloured lithograph of the same dinner, showing seating and tables for 15,000 diners and space for 25,000 bystanders. Harraden also produced views of Oxford and its colleges, images of England’s great cathedrals, and the landscape of the Lake District. Harraden’s paintings should perhaps be seen as paeans to England (his few European views are less successful), her architecture, her traditions, and her landscape, primarily expressed through his affinity with Cambridgeshire. (David Adshead & Amanda Bradley, "CATTLE LOW, AND SLEEP IS SOFT UNDER A TREE", arts|buildings|collections bulletin, 15, Spring 2011; www.nationaltrust.org.uk/abcbulletin)