This no doubt meant that landscapes, painted and
actual, were recruited to serve the interests or epitomize the wishes
of states and peoples. 'National' landscapes were called on to confirm,
and intensify, the naturalness of imagined communities. This lecture,
however, looks primarily at aspects of landscape painting, conceived as
a serious practice, that resisted or eluded this kind of ideological
recruiting.

Taking its cue from Constable's famous remark that the landscapist
was engaged in making 'something out of nothing', the lecture examines
the genre's repeated preference for the non-descript, the unenclosed,
the left-over and the insignificant. It argues that a central,
difficult strand of landscape painting took Nature's 'non-identity' as
its subject -- meaning the material world's strange mixture of
familiarity and otherness, 'humanness' and non-humanness. Cezanne may
be taken as the great exponent of this approach (and it is important
that the Provencal countryside he painted had a long Greek and Roman
history, and was subject, at the very time he was working, to various
kinds of ethnic and nationalist myth-making), but the lecture will aim
to show how fundamental to landscape painting as a whole, in the
nineteenth century, was a taste for wilderness and ordinariness -- for
the intertwining of the two characteristics, in ways that challenged
even the portentous infinities of the 'sublime'.

Professor T J Clark’s participation is made possible with the
support of the Australia Council through its International Visitor
Program.