SPACIOUS HORIZONS

In a 1712 edition of The Spectator, the English essayist and poet Joseph Addison wrote a column on the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination, which arise from the actual View and Sur vey of outward Objects’. In this, he particularly referred to ‘the Largeness of a whole View, considered as one entire Piece. Such [as] the Prospects of an open Champain Country’. Addison then went on to suggest that ‘ we are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views’, claiming that ‘A spacious Horizon is an image of Liberty, where the Eye has Room to range abroad’. Malcolm Andrews, in his book Landscape and Western Art, has argued that this statement ‘carries force in two senses: in terms of sheer spatial geography, it conveys the sense of expansive freedom to roam; it also suggests that the mind is liberated by the apparent absences of territorial boundaries inscribed on that geographical space’. It also carries force in a third sense: in 1712, some time before the first wave of parliamentary enclosures began, Addison clearly had as one of his examples the common field landscape of England – the ‘unbounded Views’ of an ‘open Champain country’ – in mind when discussing the pleasures of ‘that rude kind of Magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous Works of Nature’.

The most striking physical and visual characteristic of the unenclosed landscape was that it could indeed be open and ‘unbounded’.