High Summer
This artwork featured in Picture This (2002). A Meadow Arts commission.
“The seed of the series was planted twenty years ago when I first visited Rousham Park near my home town of Oxford. This small garden offering trees-framed vistas, winding paths, streams, classical statues, and a variety of follies and garden buildings is generally considered as the prototype where the English landscape garden was first worked out by designers Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. They in turn, were influenced by the classical landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. At a time when the gardens were still tightly enclosed and formally laid out, Bridgeman’s main innovation was to include the surrounding landscape within the garden’s design. Kent, for his part, treated the construction of the garden as if making a series of painted views, connecting one to the next by serpentine walkways. I also used two other gardens from this period, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire an Stourhead in Hampshire, which are larger and more elaborate than Rousham.
The landscape paintings of Claude and Poussin were brought back from Rome by English aristocrats on the Grand Tour which was an obligatory part of their enlightenment. These were the original tourists, travelling for pleasure and self-improvement, who, like modern tourists, encountered mishaps, were robbed or fell ill, and once away from home, indulged in promiscuous encounters, gambling and gluttony.
Ideal landscapes such as those by Claude provided a setting for the drama of human emotions and actions whilst also showing a Utopian world evoking the dream of some longed-for perfect life. There was also an erotic element to nature’s fecundity often expressed through the actions of satyrs and shepherds. This erotic freedom which caused disquiet in the viewer could, however, be legitimised by mythological references.
By placing modern tourists in such surroundings, I evoke an ironic contrast with the Arcadian dream, with the aim of interrogating our complex modern relationship with the countryside. My insistence on seeing our contemporary society through an historical filter helps counter for me the amnesia induced by the modern world.”
Image: John Goto, High Summer VI, 2002. Image courtesy the artist.
About the artist
John Goto
John Goto exhibited in Picture This, Burford House, 2002, commissioned by Meadow Arts.
Image: John Goto, High Summer VIII. Image courtesy the artist.