21st C
Margaret Gainsborough's husband hits the headlines this week. An article by Charles Glover in The Sunday Times on February 12, 2012, reports the use of one of Thomas Gainsborough's early landscapes as a weapon in the battle to protect the gentle rolling countryside he depicted around 1748.
Protesters on the east coast are angered by the threat of an army of huge new pylons marching across this area of natural beauty unchanged since Gainsborough recorded the scene two hundred and sixty years ago.
They criticize the insensitivity of the National Grid as it now plans to deliver a quarter of the country's electricity supply from new wind farms to be placed off the coast in the North Sea, using these gigantic metal structures, 196 feet high, striding across the landscape to do so. The protesters urge the authority to think again, and use underground cables to save Gainsborough's beautiful, unspoiled landscape. The painting concerned is "Wooded Landscape with Herdsman Seated" and it is housed in Gainsborough's House Museum in Sudbury.
Let's hope that the new energy secretary, Ed Davey, will be moved to cancel plans for the march of the giants and settle for the underground alternative.
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LIVING WITH MRS THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH IN THE CIRCUS, BATH, 18TH /21ST C By VIVIENNE RAE-ELLIS The following is a work in progress, to be published here in instalments. The manuscript has not been submitted to any publisher. References and bibliography will be published following the final chapter. 1) go to the Manuscript below right.. 2) Start from the top entry.. 3) Read down through the manuscript
The Circus
About Me
- Vivienne Rae-Ellis FRGS
- I am an ex-pat Tasmanian author who has lived in England since 1987. I have had eleven books published in seventeen editions by publishers who include Faber&Faber, Heinemann, Hamish Hamilton, Robert Hale, University Of Melbourne, University of Yale, Angus Robertson and the Australian Institute Of Aboriginal Studies. Subjects include biographies of three famous Australians: Trucanini, the last Aboriginal Tasmanian to live and die on the island; Louisa Anne Meredith, Australia's first resident female author, and George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of the Aborigines in the 1830's. Published work includes books for adults and for children based on the history of Australia; the paranormal;and Public Libraries.