Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Where’s the mud?

Lady Mondegreen is absolutely right — idealising Nature (with a captal ’N’) as something greater than human beings was very much part of Romanticism in all its forms (Wordsworth, for example), though Constable – unlike Turner – tends to prefer more ‘human’ landscapes. Before Romanticism, there were the 17th & 18th century landscapes that harked back very obviously and nostalgically to the pastoral tradition in poetry – ‘Nymphs & shepherds dance no more/ By sandy Ladon’s lilied banks…’), or the landscapes that seemed to be painted from the point of view of a landowner, high up and fondly contemplating his domain.

And it is also the case that Chinese & Japanese landscape painting (which I hugely admire) was idealised, although in a very different (mostly Taoist) way.

I see no problem with providing some sort of ‘context’ to any work of art, so long as it is thoughtful & illuminating, and not a sort of dissolution of the quiddity of works of art into sets of economic, social, and institutional influences which are regarded as wholly determining the works. John Barrell has some fine books on landscape painting, and on that marvellous poet John Clare, the son of an impoverished farm labourer who still has not had his due.