[title not known] 1807

Editor: This small watercolor landscape, created by Joshua Cristall around 1807, has a wonderfully muted palette. It feels very... English, somehow. What do you see in this scene? Curator: I see a landscape laden with the history of enclosure. Cristall's picturesque scene obscures the violent privatization of common lands that reshaped rural England. How can we reconcile the beauty with the dispossession it often masked? Editor: Dispossession? I hadn't considered that. So, this idyllic scene hides a story of social injustice? Curator: Indeed. Consider the artistic choices: the soft focus, the pastoral ideal. They normalize a landscape radically altered by power. It prompts us to ask: Whose stories are missing from this picture? Editor: That's given me a lot to think about; I will never see landscapes the same way again.