Until the seventeenth century, landscape served as a backdrop to historical, allegorical or figure painting. Early landscape paintings were often idealized panoramas and failed to realistically represent rural life. Landscape painting as a genre emerged in the seventeenth century, spreading from Holland where it had gained in popularity.¹

The panoramic view of the North prospect of Canterbury above is an example of an early engraving of Canterbury. It was sketched by Thomas Johnson after the Restoration of Charles II and bears testament to Stuart patronage. Johnson’s sketch which dates from c.1663-1676 was engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar, a popular Bohemian artist who became Charles II’s official scenographer, and who also produced a detailed sketch of the south side of the Cathedral. The panoramic view was published by John Ogilby, who had been elevated to the role of Master of the Royal Imprimerie in 1661.

Sketched from the direction of Place House (later Hales Place), the seat of the Royalist Colepeper family, Johnson’s sweeping panorama situates the cathedral off to the left, surrounded by trees and fields, with a skyline of rolling hills and large white cumulus clouds indicating a fine weather day. The panorama is dedicated to his grace, Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been translated to the archbishopric in 1663. A cartouche to the top left of the engraving, illustrates the coat of arms of the See of Canterbury (the Canterbury cross and pallium) combined with the three sheldrakes of the personal arms of Gilbert Sheldon. The engraving emphasizes Anglican dominance in public life, which had been cemented with The Corporation Act (1661) and The Act of Uniformity (1662) and serves as a reminder to Sheldon of his dominion in this Edenic landscape. This rural idyll carefully crafted by the artist emphasizes the harmonious relationship between civilization and nature and is an ideological statement of the stabilising power of monarchy after the turmoil of the Commonwealth.

By the eighteenth-century, experiencing or contemplating landscape was seen as a mark of cultivation and landscape paintings became highly sought after by the wealthy.² These works were often collected on The Grand Tour but were also commissioned to document estates and landownership. In a panoramic hand-tinted engraving of Canterbury from the South West prospect by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, dated 1738, the city is seen ‘rising across fields’³ in a ‘very pleasant and fertile country’⁴ stretching from St Stephen’s village on the left to an ancient Roman gateway, near the start of the long suburb of Wincheap, nestled below the wooded hills on the right. The cathedral dominates the skyline surrounded by the walled city. The city’s coat of arms appears on the lower left in a more modest position than Archbishop Sheldon’s arms which had dominated the skyline of the earlier panorama, and there is a detailed legend. A well-dressed lady and gentleman in the foreground gaze on the spectacle as a man, possibly a depiction of one of the artists, encourages them to admire the view. By situating people who are participating in and enjoying the landscape, the artists cleverly fed into the acquisitor’s psyche, and the Buck brothers later created prospects of every principal town in England and Wales. The pastoral landscape became a shared and spiritual experience, representing more than simply the picturesque. It was a performative display of wealth, but also piety as the spectators are situated, like the early pilgrims, within the sacred space of the Cathedral in its landscape. This View of the Archbishop’s Palace (1769) is a more intimate urban view which appeared in Grose’s The Antiquities of England and Wales. A dairy-maid carrying cheese or butter and a man with a basket of goods stroll through the gardens, emblematic of the agrarian landscape that surrounds the city.

By the 1800s, landscape painting had become the predominant art form.⁵ Many artists represented the cathedral in a rural setting, silhouetted against dramatic skies. Alfred Stannard’s Canterbury, Kent from the Stour Meadows (1828) presents a rural idyll as cows sip the cool water of the River Stour observed by a cowherd sitting on the bank. To the left an adult and child stroll along the footpath, and in the distance two more people are walking on the grassy meadows, revealing the importance of the area for recreation. A lithograph of Thomas Sidney Cooper’s A View of the Banks of the Stour, near Canterbury, with Cattle (1833) also illustrates cows drinking from the river with the cathedral on the horizon, framed by the rural landscape and cloudy skies. As a topographic representation of the Canterbury environs, the lithograph reflects Britain’s growing appetite in the 1830s for pastoral images. In Samuel Palmer’s watercolour of Canterbury Cathedral (1845) the landscape is seemingly insignificant and only the undulating lines where the green fields meet the dun-coloured foreground give a clue to the hilly terrain. Observed from Stuppington hill, Palmer gives an impressionistic representation of the countryside but his omissions highlight the openness and rural tranquillity of the space beyond the city.

New vistas became available to the landscape artist with the advent of the railways, and Nathaniel Whittock’s Canterbury from the Railway (1833) melds tradition and modernity, with the cathedral part of a broader cityscape and the Canterbury to Whitstable railway in the foreground. The Dane John mound and monument appears to the right of the cathedral against a backdrop of rolling hills. Above the Corona, on the eastern side the cathedral, a road leads off into the distance showing the ancient routes that pilgrims from the Continent took to reach the Cathedral, highlighting both the old ways and the new. Passengers on the railway enjoy the view in motion, passing corn stooks and the distant windmills. The lithograph is dedicated to Lord Viscount Fordwich and the Hon Richard Watson, Members of Parliament for the City of Canterbury (1830-1835) and published by Henry Gardiner Adams. The drawing “handsomely framed” was available for three guineas,⁶ allowing the middle-classes to emulate the cultivation and good taste of the aristocratic landowners by showing an appreciation of the city’s environments to their friends and families in their urban homes.

In Henry Earp’s oil painting of Canterbury Cathedral viewed from Stuppington, a shepherd and his sheepdog herd a flock of sheep up a lane whilst labourers gather the corn into stooks. Majestic trees in the foreground dwarf the cathedral. The two pillars of tradition – the natural world and the spiritual world coalesce in this beautifully serene landscape with the Caen stone towers of the cathedral dulled by the darkening skies. This bucolic scene encapsulates the liminal space where city and countryside elide. The unknown shepherd and labourers are representative of the agrarian landscape with the cathedral the main subject of the painting, but the cathedral inhabits only a small space, as the artist frames its majesty within the beauty of God’s earth.

Later artists drew on the picturesque landscape of the city to showcase the cathedral in its agrarian setting. William Sidney Cooper’s Canterbury Cathedral from the Stour Meadows is dominated by a large roundel of trees with the cathedral offset to the right. These roundels were a common feature of the landscape providing shelter for cattle and cowherds during hot or stormy days and examples of them can still be seen today in the fields off Stuppington Lane. American artist, Childe Hassam’s watercolour painting of Canterbury Cathedral painted in 1889 depicts the Cathedral in the distance seen through the haze of a rosy early morning sky. The front cover of Peter Firmin’s The Winter Diary of a Country Rat has a charming illustration of a rat, a frog, a blackbird and a robin with the cathedral in the background.

For centuries, artists have been inspired by the Cathedral in its landscape setting, celebrating its architectural glory. Let us hope that they can continue to draw inspiration from this rural backdrop for centuries to come. This article was published: 31 January 2026.

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