Stop and Look – Cecil Gordon Lawson: The Hop Gardens of England

Cecil Gordon Lawson is a little-known painter who belonged to a little-known Victorian group – the Idyllists. His only slightly more famous colleagues were Fred Walker, George Heming Mason, Matthew Ridley Corbett, George Pinwell and John William North. They deserve to be more familiar to us, for they painted some of the most attractive landscapes of the later nineteenth century: pastoral scenes imbued with a gentle melancholy, as though the artists were all too well aware that the beauty of unspoilt pre-industrial England were about to be swept irretrievably away.

Their pictures tend to be modest in size and scope, and Lawson was unusual among them in choosing to paint on a rather large scale. This canvas has a modest enough subject: hop-gardens in north Kent with scattered oast-houses, their vanes gleaming in the sunshine. But the artist’s intention was to present us with something more than just a local view. Lawson tells us that it shows a valley near Wrotham, under the North Downs between Sevenoaks and Maidstone, in what the tourist copywriters delight in calling “the Garden of England”. What with the thickly leaved hop-poles in the foreground and the distant field in which harvesters are reaping corn, there is a sense of ripeness and fecundity as in the pictures that Samuel Palmer had made in the 1830s a few miles north, up the Darenth valley at Shoreham. The plough in Lawson’s foreground might be a deliberate allusion to Palmer, though in the 1870s his early, Shoreham work was hardly remembered.

Just as Palmer intended his densely fertile rural scenes to stand for the deep mystery of English nature, Lawson and his fellow Idyllists continued these subtle themes into the later nineteenth century, and formed a link with the artists who celebrated the spiritual in nature in the early twentieth century: Sutherland, Spencer and Nash.

The hops are gone now, and the oasts nearly all converted into homes that at least retain their kilns (they are a selling-point). Their white vanes still sparkle in the sun. I remember pitching a tent, as a boy, to spend the night in a hop-garden near Cranbrook, where the oldest surviving oast, built in about 1750, still stands. Despite the huge economic changes that have overtaken the county, like everywhere else, Kent still prides itself on its ancient association with that quintessentially English activity, the brewing of beer, and Lawson’s picture presents it as a vital industry, embedded in the very geography of the land.