Andrew Hemingway, "E.P. Thompson and Art History: Achievement and Unfinished Business"

E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and other writings (together with the work of Raymond Williams) had a major impact on radical art historians in the 1970s and 1980s – this one included. Their influence can be registered, at one level, in a sequence of publications that changed fundamentally the ways in which British landscape painting is understood, including John Barrell's The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980), Michael Rosenthal's Constable: The Painter and his Landscape (1983), Ann Bermingham's Landscape and Ideology (1986), and David Solkin's Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (1982). Thompson helped make the social dimensions of landscape imagery visible to an unprecedented degree. However, while class entered the picture - in both a literal and metaphorical sense - in these texts, the artist remained an individual agent in a way that often tacitly respected the conventions of standard art-historical practice and the complexities of the position of artists as a social fraction with quite distinct interests of their own was little registered as a determining factor. The individual-centred approach may also explain the absence in this scholarship of a fully-fledged iconology of landscape. By considering these and other questions, this paper will address the achievements and shortcomings of this body of work as a contribution to Marxist cultural history.