The Landscape Paintings of John Wootton (1682-1764): Painter of the Augustan Age

This study of John Wootton, who is primarily known as a sporting artist, establishes him as England's first significant landscape painter. Although scholars have accepted that a native landscape tradition emerged only after the middle of the 18th century, Wootton's landscape paintings show the roots of that tradition to be a generation earlier. While we still know little of his early life, the substantial patronage that assured his long career developed from early connections with the aristocracy, for as a youth he was apparently page to Lady Anne Conventry, who lived near his birthplace in Warwickshire. His early training was under John Wyck; the prevalent belief that he studied in Italy now appears unlikely. Clearly authenticated paintings are known only from 1714. This study establishes a framework for dating undated works, and then, decade-by-decade, analyses the characteristics of his style and the various influences that formed it. Although Gaspard and Claude were his predominant models, Wootton adapted their classical landscape idiom, making it relevant to the English Augustans. His didactic and ironic tone reflects Augustan moral and aesthetic values and is a distinctive feature of his literary landscape sensibility. His use of metaphor and allusion is the equivalent visual language to that of the poets (Pope, Prior, Gay) and the landscape gardeners (Bridgeman, Kent), who were his close friends. Shifts after mid-century, from an aristocratic to a broader base of artistic patronage, and from contrivance to verisimilitude in the depiction of nature, distinctly transformed the content of classical landscape painting; Wootton and the Augustans were superseded. Nevertheless, the next generation of painters remained committed to the classical landscape genre, which he had grounded in English taste in the early 1720s. Moreover, as the first artist to adapt the pastoral model to the representation of English rural scenery, Wootton shaped the subsequent perception of the English countryside, having crafted that vision for his patrons from pictorial conventions he had discerningly assimilated from abroad. Appendices comprise: (I) Last Will and Testament; (II) catalogue of his collection of paintings sold in 1761; (III) letters by and relating to him; and (IV) an analysis of how he signed his paintings, with examples of his signature.