Some readers of Rural History may be familiar with a poem on the enclosure of open fields in Northamptonshire which was written, in Latin, in 1823 by the Reverend James Tyley, Rector of Great Addington in Northamptonshire. The poem began by invoking Terminus, the god of boundaries and boundary stones, of value not just as markers of private property, but as places where the aesthetic eye can find repose. Enclosure, thought Tyley, was a very good thing, on aesthetic as well as economic grounds, for wide expanses of open fields, windswept, and with no division, sometimes for twenty miles at a stretch, between one field and another, ‘strained and tortured the sight’. Well-made quickset hedges, on the other hand, marking the four edges of a ten acre rectangular field, were for Tyley as good as Optrex. He was borrowing an idea from James Thomson's great landscape poem of the mid eighteenth century, The Seasons, and its extraordinary account of the grasslands of the tropics, which Thomson had never seen, but which he declared were entirely unpaintable. There was nothing there, just grass: no fixed objects available to be used as elements in a composition, to give the scene a shape or the artist a sense of control. Confronted with ‘interminable meads, And vast savannahs’, the ‘wandering eye, Unfixt, is in a verdant ocean lost’. Most conspicuously missing, as they would be for Tyley, were the signs and divisions of private property, for the only visible thing in this unvaried sea of green were ‘wild herds’ of animals, owned by no master, confined by no fences.

But unlike Tyley, Thomson was thrilled, not repelled, by the idea of these wide open, undivided, unowned spaces. They were the opposite of the ‘little scenes of art’ so admired in Europe, whether the art was that of the painter or the quantity surveyor. In the infinite vastness of the savannahs, ‘great Nature dwells’. Her grandeur thrills and delights, a pleasure inseparable from fear - what Burke, in the generation after Thomson, would describe as ‘the sublime’, the most profound aesthetic experience there is.

Related, though untidily, to this opposition between open land which resists being composed into a landscape and enclosed land that seems to invite us to see its divisions as elements in a composition, is another, between land as private property and land as a common resource. In this book, Ian Waites re-examines the history of English landscape painting in terms of these paired binaries and the changing relation between them. Historians of art have sometimes noticed in individual pictures the representation of common land, whether arable, meadow or waste, but none has suggested that the oppositions that interest Waites might be as fundamental to the history of landscape painting in England as they were to the history of agriculture and of the culture of rural life. He begins by examining the ‘prospect paintings’ of the early eighteenth century, panoramic views of country houses principally, often surrounded by open fields shown as divided into lands and furlongs but with the thinnest scattering of bushes and solitary trees. But such paintings often show waste as well as arable, and their value for Waites is that they seem to speak of a time before the period of parliamentary enclosure, and before open arable land was routinely condemned as unimproved and wastes as criminally unproductive. This is not to say that such paintings have no ideological agenda: the pleasure to be taken in the sight of open arable land stretching away in all directions is not much to do with the pleasures of community, more with the greedy notion that the property attached to the big house at the centre of the picture may be bounded only by the horizon.

Thereafter there are chapters on images of common land from the first wave of parliamentary enclosures in the mid century through to the 1850s. George Lambert and the early Gainsborough are discussed as focusing especially on how those working for themselves, whether on common fields or woodland commons, are represented as having time to chat, to rest, to flirt, which they do not seem to have when working in enclosed land, apparently for others. There is a chapter on Turner, Constable, Cotman, De Wint and others which argues that ‘in a period of vastly increased parliamentary enclosure’, many landscape artists ‘deliberately sought out and recorded what remained’ of unenclosed heaths and wastes ‘as an immediate and direct source of what was increasingly seen as a “natural” landscape and habitat’. And so on: my attempts to summarise these chapters are becoming necessarily but misleadingly brief, but of what remains of the book I would pick out especially Waites's discussion of William Turner of Oxford, of particular interest for his sense of locality, his fascination, in the mid nineteenth century, with what was left of the extensive prospects of the pre-enclosure landscape.

How far Waites succeeds in writing an alternative history of English landscape art I am not sure. In the end, the examples he finds of images of common land are fairly few, although they could probably be greatly increased by a careful trawl through the vast topographical collections in the British Library. Anyone who knows the images Waites is working on will have plenty of small reservations about his account of them, but many will, like me, have been taught by him to approach English landscape painting with the issue of common land much more in the front of their minds.