Page 9 - Art First: Bridget Macdonald: This Green Earth

relating recurring motifs to contemporary landscapes. Thus her painting Lighthouse and Black
Cattle and other contemporary lighthouse pictures refer obliquely to the tower on Claude’s cliff
while many of the cattle, sheep and figures in the landscape which began to appear in her works
can also be traced back to Claude.

Claude’s vision gave Bridget a structure through which to explore the nature of pastoral land-
scape and its contemporary relevance, as well as its relationship to her own country background.
Born into a farming family on the Isle of Wight (to which she often returns) she was to lose this
paradise on the premature death of her father at the age of 33 when she herself was seven years
old. His loss isolated the family from active farming life and transformed them into onlookers
rather than participants in the rural round. In retrospect, however, she has come to recognise
the role of observer as good training for any artist or writer. In her own case it led to an unusual
sense of the past, linked to but not identical with a more conventionally idealised perception
of bucolic life.

Today from the rooftop terrace of her house in the centre of Malvern, whose height and com -
manding aspect with a little imagination recall the towers of San Gimignano, she can look east to
Worcester and the Severn Valley and across to Bredon Hill and the Cotswolds. In doing so she
believes that she has ‘developed a sense of place in this expansive landscape’. Comparable feelings
of familiarity and ownership are palpable in her forebear Rubens’s image Landscape with a Tower
at Het Steen at Sunset(Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford). For just as Rubens purchased
the Castle of Het Steen near Malines in Flanders as a place of retirement, so for over a decade
Bridget and her husband Angus have owned land at the head of the Suckley Valley, ten miles
from Worcester, with panoramic views of the Malvern Hills. This is countryside which also con-
forms to the Claudean pastoral ideal with its hills, rivers, woodland and farms, depicted in her
works such as Snowy Woods. Nevertheless, Bridget is acutely aware of the paradoxes and ironies
that have in reality beset such landscapes over the last century. As she says, ‘What interests me
is that Suckley remains a beautiful and fertile valley and still has extensive orchards, hop yards
and Hereford cattle. Yet the farmhouses are almost exclusively occupied by wealthy people who
have not made their money from the land but are living the pastoral dream of a retreat from the
city.’ The land is actually farmed by contract farmers who live in more modest dwellings.