Most people, if asked what is meant by ' beauty ', would begin to describe a landscape-perhaps a lake and mountain, perhaps a cottage garden, perhaps a wood with bluebells and silver birches, perhaps a little harbour with red sails and whitewashed cottages; but, at all events, a landscape. Humans, if present at all, would only be present to emphasise the much larger scale of land and sky. Even those of us for whom these popular images of beauty have been cheapened by insensitive repetition, still look to such representations of nature as unequalled sources of consolation and joy.

For almost five hundred years, European artists applied their skill to the imitation of nature. During this time numerous methods of representing landscapes were mastered and refined, culminating with a method which rendered light by a new combination of technique and vision that provided a basis of pictorial unity for the impressionists. Landscape painting, like all forms of art, was, and is, an act of faith. It feeds an appetite that is widespread and powerful, and is responsible for landscape painting being the dominant form of popular art. On a day-to-day basis, such images are used as icons, to persuade us to buy reproductions of works of art and choose our holiday destinations.

At the beginning of the British landscape movement it was widely believed that 'God dwells in everything and everything dwells in Him.' However, in the early nineteenth century, when more orthodox and systematic beliefs were declining, faith in nature became a form of religion. Although this faith is no longer accepted so readily, it still contributes a large part to that complex of memories and instincts, which are awakened in the average person by the word ' beauty '. Evaluations of beauty applied to the environment can be traced to the Wordsworthian doctrine, which underlay much of the poetry and nearly all the English painting of the 19th century.

John Ruskin's Modern Painters promulgated the belief that the inherent sanctity of nature had a purifying and uplifting effect on those who opened their hearts to her influence, was given its most elaborate statement in Ruskin's extraordinary work, which offered detailed descriptions of natural forms, leaves, branches, cloud- structures geological formations, occupying hundreds of pages. In the 21st century, the power of nature expressed by Ruskin raises a question. How far can an art form retain its vitality when it rests on the passive consent of the mass of uninformed opinion, but is not supported by the active conviction of an informed minority of artists and critics immersed in a world of abstract imaging?

This dichotomy between the standards of the general public and those at the contemporary frontiers, may be traced to England in the 18th century, when landscape art initiated the profession of landscape management whereby earth was moved, streams diverted, trees planted, and antique buildings faked to bring a painterly order into the English countryside. Managers in the profession of landscape conservation are the heirs of Capability Brown. However, the emphasis has shifted. There was a painterly objective of expressing an act of faith in nature as a mystical sense of the unity of creation expressed by light and atmosphere. Modern landscape conservation, although it applies painterly standards to views, proceeds through a faith that the science of applied ecology will unify the living elements of landscape as an aesthetic expression of local biodiversity.

Both views are based on the age-old assumption of some underlying natural order-a belief that, as Pythagoras said, nature is sure to act consistently in all her operations. However, in the European tradition, not only was the symmetry of a good landscape evaluated in terms of the disposition and balance of its important feature, but it was also necessary that the scenic features triggered notional responses that carry on tradition as surely as do the old tales and the old songs of people. They had to provoke a sense of place in the viewer based on a particular harmonious interaction of people and land. In this sense, viewing a painting of a landscape, and undergoing an interaction with the real thing, hinge on the common enjoyment of old places and objects. The response is inspired by a feeling that through long use, the latter had taken on a patina which projects our own sense of personal association far back into the past. From this viewpoint nature is incarnate in landscape.

The concept of social patina was in fact central to Constable's appreciation of what was historical. He was not like Turner, producing landscapes as a reaction to the drama of great occasions and rare atmospherics. He was never once induced to paint either a wholly invented landscape or one that formed a stage for heroic or tragic events from the past.

Constable's aim was to establish the rustic landscape on the same level of respect as the historical or classical landscapes of his contemporaries Wilson and Turner. What distinguishes Constable's use of nature's material is not just the degree to which he specialized in that, almost to the exclusion of everything else, but also the manner in which he committed himself to it. Landscape painting in England between the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, ranges from precise topography to the extremes of imaginative invention. This was not equalled in any other part of Europe. The unfolding of that artistic achievement is at innumerable points attached to the peculiar dependence of the English upon the compact, insular territory they inhabit. This sense of place is interwoven with complex social, economic, ideological and sentimental threads that have still to be adequately defined and explained. Only in Palmer's work of his Shoreham period did a vernacular landscape claim such possession of a painter's perceptions and imagination. Shoreham's downland deeply pervaded Palmers consciousness with a similar effect to Constable's, and directed his practice so powerfully.

'Pastoral feel', a term used by Constable to distinguish his approach to landscape, touches the heart of the issue. The word 'Pastoral' with all its implications, illuminates the difference which Constable so strongly sensed, dividing his appreciation of landscape from that of his contemporaries. In the history of the arts the word is associated with a shifting complex of ideas and sentiments concerning the basis of human consciousness. It encapsulates man's place in nature; the connection between the order of the natural world as divine creation and the order of art as the expression of human creativeness; the contrast between nature and civilization and between natural morality and those conventions, customs and laws evolved to protect the stability of the society. The word also denoted, apart from ideas, the forms and themes in literature and painting, and an artistically expressed dialectic of simplicity and sophistication, freedom and authority. The Pastoral ideal has been given a historical perspective in the ancient concept of a Golden Age. It has been afforded a geographical existence through the imagining of Arcadian worlds, and has gained the possibility of social achievement by the invention of numerous Utopias.

The earliest written formulations of the Pastoral were produced by such poets of antiquity as Theocritus and Virgil. Since then, it has been subject to constant renewal and reconstruction under the influence of changing material conditions. A common stance of those writers and artists, whom we associate with the Pastoral, was that they were merely reworking the traditional material and modes. Others were acting from deeper compulsions of feeling or of social and moral purpose. All were looking outwards from a civilized environment towards some Golden Age, Arcadia or Utopia, sharing the prospect with their civilized patrons.

The Western development of Pastoral and the shorter history of European landscape painting converge at two points. The Arcadian scenes directly inspired by the spirit and iconography of classical literature, of which Claude was the finest creator, meet with the English poetic landscapes inhabited by rustic figures that celebrate an actual bucolic life. The latter was made by Gainsborough in Suffolk and at Bath before Constable responded to Stour valley.

Constable has an important place in any account of the Pastoral evolution because, like Wordsworth, he propagated the idea, in words as well as pictures, that nature in terms of landscape is a chief source of happiness, well- being and the productive imagination. Its benefits are only to be enjoyed through an emotional as well as a physical alliance with it.

Constable claimed that all nature could be equally productive of emotional association and be so without claiming the benefit of intellectual guarantees. In this context, it was his wish to bring nature and the human self closer to one another. Common nature received that artistic status by its attachment to all that was human; and this could in turn be the voice of human feeling. Probably the finest fulfillment of this idea in Constable's art is the Hadleigh Castle, a work neither green nor pleasant, neither ingratiating nor benign. It fulfills, in fact, all his demands of the Sublime, so artfully satisfied by Turner in so many of his historical landscapes, but it does so in a peculiar, personal and forward-looking way which makes it one of the most advanced works of its time. It manifests a sense of the relationship between art and nature, which was authentically new. It reveals the simplicities of nature without Wordsworth's rhetoric of portentous emotions.

The very term landscape implies something different from the word nature, the one being boundless and indefinite, the other organised and confined. English sightseers and landscape fanciers of the 18th century had instinctively and compulsively transferred their appreciation of what was natural into the scenic packages of views and prospects carrying an artistic seal of approval. Here, the essence of a view or prospect is a combination of distinctive physical, biological and social features, which hold attention because each is clearly delineated from the rest. Nowhere is this aspect of pictorial impact by division better expressed than in boundaries between fields, woodland, riverbanks, and ditches. These are the very features that England's intensive agrarianism had produced in the endless wrestling match between Suffolk farmers and nature, which in England is primeval deciduous forest. This response to ever-encroaching nature has over the centuries sharpened up boundaries to produce views that we associate with the English pastoral scene. This was the essence of Constable's synthesis of nature and self.

Suffolk's enclosed landscapes are ancient and belong to the first phase of division predating the communal fields of the feudal system. Although much of this finely divided patchwork of fields has now been obliterated by industrial agriculture, old maps show that the process of enclosure had produced landscapes that differed significantly from village to village. On the other hand, removal of hedges in recent times has often created Brownian scenery with isolated tree belts and lengths of hedgerow with trees that look like 18th century parkland. Both kinds of management are associated with distinct ecological communities.

Boundaries can take us even further back in time. There are the social divisions between villages mapped as parish boundaries, and even further into the past are the tribal and clan boundaries, notably the Hundredal frontiers, which were in place by the time of the Norman Conquest. With few exceptions boundaries between Hundreds coincide with the boundaries of the parishes at their edges. Often they follow steep-sided brooks that are the legacy of melt waters of the last East Anglian glaciation. These social distinctions attached to physical features make the connection between East Anglia's raw topography, and a succession of occupations of Celts. Romans and Anglo Saxons. The Saxon system of Hundreds produced the county wide topographical division of Suffolk that is still evident in boundaries between present day local authorities, and the constituency divisions of the European parliament. In this connection, the old Hundred boundaries provide a topographical basis for an integrated classification of landscapes that welds the process of geomorphology with a continuous timeline of history with ecology.