Ancient farmers discovered that repeatedly growing the same crop on the same plot of land soon led to falling yields and crop failure. We now understand this is the result of falling soil fertility: as successive harvests extract nitrogen and other essentials from the soil, without their replenishment there’s none for the plants to incorporate into their fruit or seed. Although animal fertiliser could compensate to some extent, the only solution was to ‘rest’ that land, to allow its soil fertility to be restored.
In southern Europe, including lands bordering the Mediterranean, crop rotation had been adopted by classical times, and was described by the Roman poet Virgil. This typically followed a two-year cycle:
As a result, at any time half the arable land would be productive, and half fallow and without a crop.
In northern Europe, a three-year cycle developed during the Middle Ages and later. This might run:
This is reflected in a different pattern in arable land, with only a third of it being left fallow at any time.
During the seventeenth century, farmers in the Low Countries appear to have adopted more elaborate rotations, and those were imported to England as the Norfolk Four-Course Rotation in the following century. In this:
This depended on integrating livestock production with arable farming, by adding cows to the sheep-corn system, which had become increasingly popular over this period.
One way to assess this is in paintings of farmed countryside, looking at the patterns of usage in fields. I show a small selection of examples here.
In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565, much of the land visible is devoted to a single wheat crop, sown at the same time, and harvested together at the end of the summer. Some fields on the lower ground, closer to the town and estuary in the distance, are still green, though, suggesting they may be pasture being grazed during their fallow year.
At the same time as crop rotations were being developed, land was being enclosed and its use transformed from communal grazing for livestock to arable fields. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed and ploughed up for agriculture.
At about the same time, Alexandre Calame’s Swiss Landscape shows the shore of one of the country’s large lakes, probably Lake Geneva, with much smaller plots of land within large open fields, and a range of different crops being cultivated. This is more typical of the older sub-divided fields close to villages during earlier centuries in England.
By 1853, when the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany and painted Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany, this small village had retained similar small plots being farmed in different ways, almost like the allotment gardens that developed around cities at this time.
Fields shown on the side of Les Jalais in Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise from 1867 are divided into larger strips, and are at different stages of cultivation. Some are still earth brown following ploughing, others are green, and some may be ready to harvest. These appear to be in a longer crop rotation, perhaps four-course.
Although the classical two-year cycle was retained for longer in southern France, by 1890-92 when Paul Cézanne painted this Hillside in Provence, the pattern of colour in the fields makes it more likely that a three-year or longer rotation was in use.
By the early twentieth century, most farmland in England had been enclosed, but the fields in Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, from the period 1939-44, remain open and still in use for a sheep-wheat system.
Perhaps the lesson here is that accounts of land use and crop rotations are too generalised to reflect the rich variety of local farming methods. As I have so far concentrated on arable and sheep farming, in the next article I’ll look at cattle and milk production.
Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and expect them to be laundered, soiled clothing and linen still had to be washed, normally in the nearest outdoor body of water. This weekend I’m celebrating the many centuries that women washed clothes outdoors, and were painted as part of the landscape. This first article covers the period up to the height of Impressionism at the end of the 1870s, and tomorrow’s resumes in 1880 and concludes in the early twentieth century.
Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne’s Landscape with Washerwomen, probably from around 1700-20, shows a common sight, as do many early landscapes: a small group of women have taken sheets and clothes in large wicker baskets to a small lake, and are washing them as well as they can.
Alessandro Magnasco’s Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20) shows a similar scene, the women having walked down from the town glimpsed in the distance. At the lower left is a man out hunting with his dog and gun.
On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.
Henri Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolour between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town whose linen was being cleaned in that river.
By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was just starting. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.
The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.
By the late nineteenth century, with the growth of towns and cities, laundry had became more organised, as shown in Martín Rico’s Washerwomen of Varenne (1865). A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river, most of them probably performing this as a commercial service, as it was one of the few occupations open to women of the lower classes. For Rico they transform his landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.
Working women are also featured in some of Eugène Boudin’s painterly oil sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76. This laundress appears to be beating her washing with a mallet to drive the dirt out.
In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in the sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.
While most of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes are relatively unpopulated, he also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of some, including this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879. They appear to have brought their washing down to the water in wicker baskets, on an ancient wheelbarrow.
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