Abstract
In quest of the simple life we find ourselves at the cottage. Embowered by trees, covered in flowering vines, roofed in thatch, and walled with timbers, brick and roughcast, the cottage stands in eighteenth-century thought as the natural domain of domestic peace and happiness. In romantic Britain the cottage was an alternative to all that was cold, formal and forbidding. For as one cottage enthusiast, the architect and drawing master James Malton, declared in comparing the cottage to the manor house:
The matured eye, palled with gaudy magnificence, turns disgusted from the gorgeous structure, fair sloping lawn, well turned canal, regular fence, and formal rows of trees; and regards, with unspeakable delight, the simple cottage, the rugged common, rude pond, wild hedgerows, and irregular plantations. Happy he! Who early sees that true happiness is distinct from noise, from bustle, and from ceremony; who looks for it, chiefly, in his properly discharging his domestic duties, and by early planting with parental tenderness, the seeds of content in his rising offspring, reaps the glad harvest in autumnal age.1
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Notes
James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture (London: Hookham & Carpenter, 1798), pp. 6–7.
Helpful architectural histories of the cottage include: Olive Cook, English Cottages and Farmhouses (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982); John E. Crowley’s Picturesque Comfort: The Cottage, in his The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 203–29; Tony Evans and Lycett Green, English Cottages (New York: The Viking Press, 1983); Sutherland Lyall, Dream Cottages: From Cottage Orneé to Stockbroker Tudor (London, Robert Hale Ltd, 1988). The cult of the cottage has been explored by John Dixon Hunt, ‘The Cult of the Cottage’, The Lake District: A Sort of National Property (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1988), pp. 71–84. On the ‘simple life’ see Maren-Sofie Rmstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1954).
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture (Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1977), p. 12.
Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth-Century French Theory (London: A. Zwemmer, Ltd., 1962), pp. 173–84. See, too, Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
Charles Middleton, Picturesque and Architectural Views for Cottages, Farm Houses and Country Villas (London: Edward Jeffery, 1793), p. 1.
Uvedale Price, Sir Uvedcile Price, On the Picturesque, with an Essay On the Origin of Taste, by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, bart., and sixty illustrations, designed and drawn on the wood by Montagu Stanley, R.S.A. (Edinburgh: Caldwell, Lloyd, 1842), p. 393.
Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamental Cottages and Their Scenery: Including some Observations on the Labourer and His Cottage. In Three Essays (London: J. Taylor, [1800], 1804), p. vii.
The classic formulation of emulation is Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); more recently Neil McKendrick has used this model to describe the marketing successes of Josiah Wedgwood (see N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, 1982).
Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 82–4.
Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), p. 238.
John Wood, A Series of Plans for Cottage or Habitations of the Labourer (London: J. Taylor, 1806, first edition 1781), p. 3.
Ibid.
William Atkinson, Cottage Architecture, Including Perspective Views and Plans of Labourers Cottages, and Small Farm Houses (London: J. Barfield, 1805), pp. v—vi.
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 25–32.
Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in The Works of Hannah More (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher & P. Jackson, 1834) III: 44.
John B. Papworth, Rural Residences, Consisting of a Series ofDesigns for Cottages, Decorated Cottages, Small Villas and Other Ornamental Buildings (London: R. Ackerman, 1818), p. 25.
T.D.W. Dean, Sketches in Architecture Consisting of Original Designs for Cottages and Rural Dwellings, Suitable to Persons of Moderate Fortune, and for Comfort and Retirement (London: J. Taylor, 1807), p. 5.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. R.W. Chapman, 5 vols (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) I: 251.
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 46.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 48.
John Hayes, ed., The Letters ofThomas Gainsborough (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 68.
Ibid., p. 152.
See Marcia Pointon, ‘Gainsborough and the Landscape of Retirement’, Art History, 2 (December 1979), pp. 441–55; John Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983) I, pp. 149–56; Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: ‘A Little Business for the Eye’, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 204–11.
Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 112–17, 179.
Ibid., p. 112.
The four large cottage doors are: The Woodcutter’s Return, Belvoir Castle, c. 1772–73 (58 x 48 inches); Cottage Door with Children Playing, Cincinnati Museum, RA 1778 (48 1/4 x 583/4 inches); The Cottage Door, Huntington Museum, RA 1780 (58 x 47 inches); Peasant Smoking at Cottage Door, University of California, Los Angeles, Spring 1788 (77 x 62 inches). The Scudemore painting, Cottage Door with Woman Sweeping and Girl with Pigs (38 3/4 x 48 3/4 inches), is now in the Ipswich Museum. A copy of The Woodcutter’s Return (Belvoir Castle), made by Gainsborough, is the Fuji collection in Japan.
Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, I, p. 150.
Ibid., p. 151.
Quoted in Robyn Asleson and Shelley Bennett, British Paintings at the Huntington (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 112.
Asleson and Bennett, p. 112, and John Constable, John Constable’s Discourses, ed. R.B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), p. 67.
The only variation from this formula is the Scudemore Cottage Door with Women Sweeping and Girl with Pigs (Ipswich) which shows a dejected young girl seated at the steps of a cottage observing a pig while a woman stands at the door with a broom.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Reviere, 4 Vol. (New York: Basic Books, 1959) IV, pp. 376–7, 399, 403.
See his ‘Gainsborough’s Rural Vision’, The Listener, 12 May 1977, pp. 615–16, and The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sidney: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 65–77.
Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape, pp. 70–7 and ‘Gainsborough’s Rural Vision’, pp. 615–6.
On Kinkade’s commercial empire see Susan Orlean, ‘Art for Everybody: How Thomas Kinkade turned Painting into Big Business’, The New Yorker (15 October 2001), pp. 124–31.
In short, the tax burden in the United States has been shifting steadily downwards so that those classes least able to afford to pay taxes and those most in need of what taxes can secure are one and the same. Meanwhile corporations and the upper 10% of householders who currently hold more than 96% of the nation’s wealth pay less that 10% of the nation’s income tax. Thus the middle and lower classes, who bear an inordinate tax burden because of these gross inequalities, come to resent a tax system which has become increasingly oppressive. For this reason, the right-wing agenda to dismantle the federal and state tax systems continues to enjoy popular support. On this subject see, among other political analysts, Paul Krugeman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Centuty (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003).
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© 2005 Ann Bermingham
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Bermingham, A. (2005). The Simple Life: Cottages and Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors. In: de Bolla, P., Leask, N., Simpson, D. (eds) Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502048_3
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