Upon entering the Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper at the Clark Art Institute’s Manton Research Center, one must adjust to the dim lighting and low contrast. But, opening with an explanation of Arcadia, the idyllic domain of the Greek god Pan, the Clark’s latest exhibition quickly comes into focus. Pastoral on Paper features work by 17th century French Baroque artist Claude Lorrain and 18th century English Rococo artist Thomas Gainsborough, as well as pieces from their Dutch contemporaries.
The exhibition, curated by William Satloff Grad Art ’25, an intern at the Manton Research Center, explores the compositional elements of seventeenth and eighteenth century depictions of rural landscapes on paper. Inspiration budded, Satloff said, from the Williamstown scenery and blossomed into a curatorial project — a rare opportunity for students like himself. “I wanted to have it be about what we are actually seeing, and how these images are constructed,” he said.
Opening the show, two etchings by Nicolaes Berchem portray the sublime, sunlit grace of cowherds at water, breaking through the monochrome of intaglio ink. Berchem’s works, like many others in the exhibition, draw inspiration from Virgil’s Eclogues, a series of 10 poems about the herdsmen of Arcadia. “The landscapes are vistas of desire and perfection,” Satloff said during his lecture on the exhibition last Sunday.
After proceeding through the vestibule where Berchem’s etchings are displayed, the viewer encounters a dramatic splay of Lorrain’s work. The second part of the exhibition features several small chalk and ink pieces and one ornately-framed oil painting, vivid with rustic glamour. “I wanted to include at least one painting in the show,” Satloff said in an interview with the Record. “Because the pastoral is not often associated with works on paper.”
Jacob, the painting’s biblical subject, passes by a timeless, Romanesque castle. The Arcadian herdsmen depicted in the Eclogues are also present, ushering their livestock through still water and lush, green flora. “The painting is essentially a poetic celebration of the bounty of the natural world,” according to Satloff’s curatorial description of the painting.
The gallery’s unique U-shaped curve offers the exhibition’s longest view: an illustrated tome of Virgil’s poetry to reveal a set of bucolic drawings blurred with distance. Lorrain and Gainsborough drew many of their landscapes outside, Satloff wrote, replicating elements directly from the scenes in front of them. However, according to Satloff, both chose to add imagined elements to balance the composition and add depth. “The process of drawing — sometimes we think about it as this indexical thing, like photography, like what’s in front of me I’m going to capture,” Satloff said. “But that’s not necessarily what happens, or even not necessarily what the goal is of the artist.”
Many of the works in Pastoral on Paper were done in black and white chalk with layers of gouache or ink. This freehand style — different from that of highly detailed, controlled Baroque oils like Lorrain’s depiction of Jacob’s voyage — offers the distinct tranquility of windblown pasture.
Satloff wrote that 18th century depictions of pastoral landscapes often included the architecture of the time. Lorrain’s oil painting, Satloff noted, is unique in its aim to evoke the grandeur of old; most pieces in the exhibition feature ramshackle structures and ruins. Depicting dilapidated homes poses poignant questions about the lives of people living in the area. “By including architectural features within pastoral landscapes, artists may sometimes be making moral, social, and political statements about rural life and land management,” he wrote in the description of Ruins and Cottages.
Instead of reminiscing about the glory of Italian antiquity, Gainsborough’s landscapes fondly depict the English countryside, a subject artists of the time largely ignored, Satloff explained. His sentimental pictures — created a century after Lorrain’s — offer a reprieve from the stress of modernization, portraying the cyclical nature of nostalgia. However, like Lorrain, Gainsborough seems to take inspiration from the Cinquecento masters. “He does the golden light, or the ‘Italian light,’ on English walls,” Satloff said.
The final section of Pastoral on Paper highlights the human and animal figures of rural landscapes. With a percussive visual rattle, the tambourine woman of Lorrain’s etching Dance Under the Trees sets a beat for her companions. In many of the exhibition’s other pieces, various figures lounge and recreate, taking in their surroundings with an apparent sense of awe. “It was, [about] these artists … who worked ‘en plein air,’ who drew out in nature,” he said. “How, when they’re seeing something in front of them, are they translating that to the paper, but in that process, idealizing what they’re seeing in front of them.”
The shepherds’ idle poses and serene gazes are a reverie, according to Satloff. By choosing only to represent leisure, the artists misconstrue the nature of rural life into a Grecian fantasy. The figures in each piece blend together, lacking almost any distinctive flair of personality, activating a sense of timeless, nomadic ease, he explained during his talk.
The exhibition’s focus on the romanticization of rural life — a theme especially relevant in the Berkshires, an area with a high rate of second-home ownership — asks the viewer to confront their own relationship with the landscape and people who consider it their primary home. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful place,” he said referring to the area surrounding the Clark. “But, you know, landscape architects work on these things and create these vistas that are so seductive, but it’s not necessarily nature.”
Even the cattle cannot escape idealization. “There’s never any indication that the animals are going to be eaten, or even that the animals are there to produce animal products,” Satloff said.
As the seasons shift, Satloff hopes to impart viewers with a sense of connection to their surroundings. The final photo of his slideshow included the famous cows of Stone Hill nestled in verdant summer grass. “Before long, we’ll have a pastoral landscape in our own backyard here at the Clark,” he said.
Pastoral on Paper will be showing at the Clark until June 15.
