The Englishness of English Art (N. Pevsner) - Review

The Search for Englishness: a German perspective
A review of Nikolaus Pevsner’s book “The Englishness of English Art”
What could be more pleasant than sitting down at around 5 o’clock with a cup o’tea, tuning
into BBC and listening to some fine lectures on the search of English national character in art?
Anything, really, but such was my task, as I had a neatly organized book on English art to review.
The book is relatively short, and it is in fact a series of lectures written down and organized into
chapters, and despite its seeming compactness, the book uptakes a great challenge: it tries to find
and define the Englishness in English art over quite an extended period. Pevsner is quite German,
actually: he underlines this in his foreword, admitting to be neither born nor bred in England. What
makes him a person to look for Englishness? As he puts it, he has come to England being an adult
and thus has a fresh perspective of an objective outsider who over time fit it and studied the subject
in great detail. He did, in fact: he is author to a massive collection of volumes on British
architecture, town by town, fourty-six books which are altogether known as “Pevsner’s
Architectural Guides”. But rather than having a mostly descriptive mood to it, “The Englishness
of English Art” is an analytical attempt to organize knowledge about distinctive features of English
art and connect it to English national character whatever it may be. He doesn’t attempt to cover
Britain, however; England is by itself a complicated enough subject of analysis.
Before him, a similar attempt was made my another German scholar, Dagobert Frey, in
1942. It’s not difficult to assume the stance of that book judging by the time of its publication:
Germany was quite a handful during those years. Pevsner, mentioning his predecessor (with a little
over a decade between them), claims to approach the question from a different perspective, both
scholarly and ideologically. But does he manage to escape a specific perspective, a certain degree
of Germanness of the war and post-war period, a sort of a nationalistic approach, an ideological
edge? He moves methodically from example to generalization to example, yet some of his claims
concerning the so-called Britishness do seem ephemeral. He states at the beginning that English
art “in nearly all ages escapes the system”, which goes somehow in contradiction with the purpose
of his work. He ends up naming, describing and exemplifying quite a few characteristics of English
art according to his opinion, yet he never lists them, which forces the reader to pay close attention
to the whole body of the text. The examples, which he not only describes but also provides in
pictures in the very book, do seem in accordance with his theory, yet they quite often contradict
one another: reasonableness, “an all-pervading English quality”, exemplified by the Perpendicular
style for Pevsner, goes along with irrationality and illogicality, shown in cases of St-Martin-on-
the-Field or Lincoln Cathedral with its vaults. Contradiction pervades Pevsner’s argument, but
according to him, contradiction is also something that describes English art, and artists themselves
(for example, Reynolds) are not blind to it. More and more with every page and every argument,
the subject seems more elusive and harder to get a full picture of. In other words, if Pevsner was
right in anything, that would be his claim about English art escaping the system. But in any case,
his perspective is interesting to look at, and it is a strategically good point to discuss English art
from a critical standpoint.
Among other undeniably “all too English” traits he lists conservatism, rational approach
(which goes hand in hand with reasonableness), compromise and cant (a pair in conflict, “a most
English problem”, evident for Pevsner in Reynold’s career), a certain degree of artistic detachment
(specific to Hogarth), moderation and temperance (coming, rather interestingly, from the English
climate), reticence and taciturnity (Pevsner notices comparatively shy usage of aesthetic nudity, a
claim open to debate), disembodiment and non-corporality; he also talks of a few visual techniques
specific to England (e.g., “piecing” the interior space in architecture) and of several uniquely
English notions such as English landscape in fine arts, gardening and even urban planning. For
each he has either a work or art or an artist to give example. Some of them hardly come together
in one cohesive pictures, others can be overthrown by other examples, yet for this Pevsner also
has an answer: any national character, he says, is subject to change and transformation, unstable
and mutable. The idea of ‘national character’, being that elusive, is central in Pevsner’s thought.
It is no less than amusing how notions of “Englishman” turn into a collective metaphor,
how his “Englishness” gets a fully human agency in his writing, and even English language, quite
in the spirit of Whorf and his linguistic relativity theory, becomes a production point of some
pervasive national character, which in its turn is mirrored in art. England itself is personified: it
“dislikes and distrusts revolution”, “speaks in a low voice” in that “muffled” tongue and breads
“practical, handy Englishmen”. A personified figure of England, together with the typical
Englishman (a rather aristocratic and proud creature, judging from Pevsner’s argument) resides in
that typical English climate, which also has its effects on national character and art. According to
Pevsner, it’s responsible for the moderate character of some English art, for its flux, “ever-
changing nature”, mistiness and in general is seen in nearly all traits he identifies in the book. And
of course, it is responsible for the birth of English landscape art, one of the Englishest things we
can think of.
Here in that last point, he may very well be right, I assume; yet as much I like his personal
approach, attention to artists’ biographies, his grasp of language and moderate usage of fantasy
against the background of solid facts, essentializing Englishness as a hard fact and lack of
historical/political perspective are to be noted. The book is enjoyable and present a valuable source
of history of art, something Pevsner is surely professional at, yet it’s also prone to the pervasive
idea of some intrinsic national character, the desire to group, define and explain observations to
systematize them and a certain degree of blindness to purely historical data (especially that of
colonial times and war times, still too recent in Pevsner’s days). But being of the opinion that
books owe us no answers but opportunities to entertain thoughts, viewpoints and speculations, it
is overall a curious book that is rich in imagery and information on the most important notions
associated with British art.

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The Search for Englishness: a German perspective

A review of Nikolaus Pevsner’s book “The Englishness of English Art”

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