Page 7 - Art First: Bridget Macdonald: This Green Earth

‘The vast subject of landscape’

Bridget Macdonald is very much an art-historian’s artist. I well remember her residency at the
Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1990s. As Senior Cura -
tor there it was one of my pleasant duties to inspect the galleries daily and I would usually find
Bridget carefully scrutinising or drawing from our masterpieces in landscape, such as Rubens’s
Landscape in Flanders(The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham) or respond-
ing with a vari ation in her beloved media of charcoal, graphite or pastel. She would always have
a searching comment or question about what she referred to as ‘the vast subject of landscape.’

This Green Earth by its very title recalls the pigment terra verde much used as underpaint by early
Italian artists, while also setting a poetic note for the current exhibition, to which we will return.
The works displayed here subtly demonstrate Bridget’s deep engagement with animals, myth
and the landscape as mediated by her acknowledged fascination with the Old Masters, par tic u -
larly Claude Lorrain (1604/5–82) and Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577 –1640) as well as morerecent
virtuosi in landscape such as Samuel Palmer (1805–81), one of Britain’s greatest art ists of the
Romantic period. Echoes of their vision are detectable in much of her work and acknowledged
in such drawings as Study after Rubens’s Landscape in Flanders. This approach seems to have been
stimulated by her time at the Barber, which suggested ways of tackling landscape that were both
individual and also reflected her existing interests. Before that Bridget had been concerned
mainly with the human figure, working from literary and poetic sources with a particular interest
in the art of the Italian Renaissance—sources that are immediately apparent in The Sacrificial Bull
(Ara Pacis), with its echoes of Mantegna and classical Antiquity. During her Barber residency
this penchant evoked graphic variations on Giovanni Bellini, Beccafumi, and Dosso Dossi. She
also worked directly from Claude’s Pastoral Landscape of 1645 (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Birmingham) and went on to take elements of this painting to make new images,