Cottages orné

click photo to enlarge

I suppose the opposite of a blot on the landscape is an ornament on the landscape: something that is designed to beautify a location. The well-to-do have sought such things down the centuries in various forms including tree planting, artificial lakes, eye-catcher follies and monuments, and country houses in what they consider to be the best of taste.

But what is a wealthy landowner or lord to do beyond these in order to elevate his surroundings above those of his neighbours? Well, he could build a complete village of decorative houses, or if that would stretch his purse too far, he could control the entry to his grounds by building a lodge or two in the style known as cottage orné. These buildings, ornamental, artful, rustic, often asymmetrical, arose in England out of the eighteenth century cult of the Picturesque and continued to be built well into the nineteenth century. Often they were gatekeeper's lodges, sometimes simply the cottages of farm or other labourers who worked on the estate. In some cases, however, they were built on a grander scale and were designed for "rustic" living by the wealthy. The early nineteenth century example in today's photograph was a lodge at the entry to the long gone home of the Beridge family, Algarkirk Park, in Lincolnshire. It is painted brick with a conical tile roof and a centrally placed chimney stack. A small wing extends out of the main circular structure. The windows are pointed, and nearby is the remains of the old limestone wall that formed part of the entrance to the country house grounds.

When I first saw this building, several years ago, I imagined it was either a cottage orné or a toll house for a turnpike road (these sometimes had fanciful designs too). I've photographed the building a few times but without much success. What appealed to me on this occasion was the wispy clouds overhead. I adjusted my position to let one of them introduce a note of asymmetry to my symmetrical composition.

N.B. Man masters machine "triumph of the day"
Having ignored diacritical marks (accents) in the blog thus far, today I was minded to put them in: hence the acute on the e of orné. I remember learning how to do this with the ALT key and numerical codes years ago, but I just never got round to putting it into practice here. The problem is, now that I've done it once, I'll have to do it always henceforth!

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 48mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Picturesque Derwent Water

click photo to enlarge

No one in the seventeenth century would have felt that a hot sunny day was best enjoyed outdoors. Nor would they have surveyed Derwent Water and its surrounding hills and mountains of the Lake District and described the scene as beautiful. In those times the heat of the sun was to be avoided. Charles II, who was raised in France (and so knew the heat of a continental summer) said that "he liked...that country best, which might be enjoyed the most hours of the day, and the most days of the year, which he was sure was to be done in England more than in any country whatsoever." Rugged landscape in the seventeenth century was "the blasted heath", "the waste", a place to be avoided, and not to be compared with the beauty of the cultivated lowlands.

The eighteenth century continued to hold the same views about hot sunshine, but, slowly the attitude towards mountainous and wild landscape changed. Anthony Ashley Cooper, John Dennis and Joseph Addison wrote about the agreeable, fearful pleasures that arose in crossing the Alps. Edmund Burke's philosophy took up this theme. The rise of the Picturesque was part of Romanticism's reaction against the quickening pace of science's uncovering of the mysteries of the natural world, and it gave a more formal structure to this way of looking at the world. It viewed the emotions stirred by untamed nature as instinctive, sublime, worthy, and as something to be actively sought. Writers, musicians and the visual arts fed on these new sensibilities. Highly influential was Thomas Gilpin's, "Observations of the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770", published in 1782. It urged people to stop dismissing the rugged landscape of the British Isles, and admire it according to the ideals he proposed. The ripples from Gilpin and the Picturesque spread through English painting, landscape gardening, poetry, and out into Europe and the United States.

Had he been born a hundred years earlier William Wordsworth would never have sat by the waterfall above Derwent Water and listened to the "roar that stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodor", or thought of moving to live at Grasmere, still less sought his inspiration in Lakeland's crags and peaks, or spent his last years at Rydal Mount. It was writers like Wordsworth and his friend, Coleridge, and painters like Richard Wilson, Cozens (father and son) and Francis Towne who also deserve our thanks for opening our eyes to the beauties of scenes like that shown in today's photograph.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On