‘A notable feature of much of the artist’s painting is the almost total absence of high lights and cast shadows. Such a mode of treatment, in the hands of a less capable draughtsman, might well produce a painful impression of feebleness or lack of definition. Not so, however, in the case of Mr. Frampton. With him, indeed, this diffused illumination is a matter of deliberate purpose.’[1]

As Aymer Vallance attested in 1919, Edward Reginald Frampton was an unlikely master of light and colour. By eschewing the orthodoxies of representational painting, Frampton created an oeuvre of works lit by an otherworldly glow, an idiosyncrasy that was never more effective than in his late-career landscape works, of which this painting, The Sympathy of Land and Sky, is a prime example.

E.R. Frampton, the son of a stained-glass designer, was educated at Westminster School of Art and had an apprenticeship in his father’s studio. Although this early exposure to sacred stained-glass evidently rubbed off on Frampton, he was confirmed in his predisposition for decorative modes of painting when he first saw the works of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones at the New Gallery Exhibition of 1898-99. This encounter had a marked effect on Frampton, who was struck ‘with the force of a very revelation, opening his eyes to the supreme possibilities of human form in decoration’.[2] Much of Frampton’s oeuvre consists of religious, mythological and literary painting, often executed in a late Pre-Raphaelite idiom. His other love was for early Italian painting, the artistic school which of course gave Pre-Raphaelitism its name.

Frampton would frequently work extensive landscapes into the backgrounds of his subject pictures. These were almost always luminously coloured and, as Vallance noted, without shadow or highlights. The effect of this novel approach is that his paintings often seem lit from within, much as a stained-glass window appears. This decorative bent extended into the spatial arrangement of his compositions, which often threw aside established conventions of perspective and scale.

In the final years of his life, Frampton focused much of his efforts on producing pure landscape works. As in many of his other works, Frampton’s subject is the Sussex South Downs, and more specifically, the Ouse Valley. Frampton went to school in Brighton and the area clearly appealed to him; in his 1924 memorial exhibition held by The Fine Art Society (which included The Sympathy of Land and Sky) there are no fewer than thirteen pictures whose titles refer to places in the South Downs.

In his catalogue introduction to that 1924 exhibition, Rudolf Dircks stated that Frampton saw the countryside ‘with the eyes of a painter who is also a poet’. [3] Dircks’ likening of Frampton to a poet underscores the intense lyricism of his landscapes. The Sympathy of Land and Sky sits at a fascinating intersection in the development of British landscape painting. On the one hand it is a lyrical, visionary, and perhaps even spiritual, landscape in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. Yet on the other, the painting anticipates the modernist landscapes of painters like Eric Ravilious, who was himself famously drawn to Sussex and even the Ouse Valley itself.

Like many of his other Ouse Valley pictures, The Sympathy of Land and Sky is an essay on lighting and atmospehric effect. Whilst Sussex, Mount Caburn from Itford Hill shows the South Downs either at dawn or sunset, our landscape is bathed in sunshine beneath clear blue skies and cirrus clouds. In line with the rest of his oeuvre, The Sympathy of Land and Sky is painted without shadow or highlights – the midday sunshine illuminates all aspects of the painting evenly. The matte, textured paint surface further softens the colours, leaving the picture completely impervious to glare.

As in some of his other Sussex landscapes, Frampton has oriented the canvas vertically, with a large portion of canvas given to the sky. The picture’s format and Frampton’s idiosyncratic lighting are somewhat atypical for landscape painting as a genre and do not necessarily correspond with how we view actual landscapes outdoors. By approaching from such an unfamiliar perspective, the Frampton gives the view a distinctly decorative quality. Rudolf Dirks thought as much, saying that:

‘if he changed the subject of his paintings [towards landscape rather than figurative painting], his attitude remained essentially the same, his presentment decorative. Sea and country appealed to him as pattern, as design for decoration.’[4]

Whilst many of his other Sussex landscapes have geographically descriptive titles, the very name The Sympathy of Land and Sky instructs us that we are not looking at mere topography, but rather an exploration of how a landscape might be translated into form and light on a canvas. This is especially true of the clouds which, set against the blue sky, are almost abstracted. Here Frampton seems to pre-empt the very British sensibility for semi-abstracted modernism seen in Paul Nash’s Second World War pictures and Barbara Hepworth’s Cornish paintings of sand, sea and sky. Whilst much of Frampton’s post-Pre-Raphaelitism was perhaps backwards looking, his late landscapes constitute a real step towards the modernism of the middle decades of the 20th Century.

[2] Ibid., p.67

[3] R. Dircks, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Water-Colours by the late E. Reginald Frampton, exh. cat., London, 1924, p. 4.

[4] Ibid.