View Overlooking Fields to Distant Mountains, with a Cottage at Right 

Editor: This is "View Overlooking Fields to Distant Mountains, with a Cottage at Right," by James Ward. It’s difficult to put a date on it but it's created with pencil and looks like a preliminary sketch for a larger piece, perhaps? It has this very pastoral feel to it, almost dreamlike. What do you see in this piece? Curator: What interests me here is the labour involved in the representation of landscape itself. Consider the graphite; how was it sourced, processed? Think about the social context surrounding both artistic production and land ownership during Ward's time. Who had access to land and the leisure to depict it? Editor: That's a really interesting way to think about it. So you're saying the sketch itself embodies economic and social relationships of the time? How does the cottage play into this? Curator: Precisely. The cottage is important because it likely signifies labour tied to the land, the material conditions of rural life. We also can't ignore how these sketches sometimes romanticized that reality. Think of the market for such landscapes, who consumed them, and what they represented to a rising urban middle class. What materials and what labour were necessary for its production and eventual consumption? Editor: So, beyond just appreciating its aesthetic value, we can also analyze it as a product of specific social and economic forces? Curator: Exactly. Art isn't created in a vacuum. The tools, the land it represents, the market that consumes, and the labour… all tell us so much more. Editor: I hadn't considered all that. It definitely gives me a different perspective, it's not just about rolling hills, but also who owned them. Curator: And who could afford to admire them framed on a wall.