For some years there has rested among piles of second hand books on my bookshelf a rather dilapidated book with loose pages entitled ‘The Landscapes of Thomas Hardy’ by Donald Maxwell. It was published by Cassell in 1928.

I remember buying the book in Hay on Wye. The mecca of second hand book shops. I can’t remember how much I paid for it but probably no more than a couple of pounds as it was in a very poor condition. Other than its associations with Thomas Hardy, I was intrigued by the watercolour plates it contained and fully intended researching the artist, a task I must admit to have only just undertaken.

Donald Maxwell was born in Clapham, London in 1877 and died at the age of just 59 in 1936. In a short but certainly accomplished life he was a much celebrated writer and illustrator. After attending the Clapham Art School, the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, Donald became the official artist to the Admiralty during World War 1.

As a keen yachtsman he was given the opportunity to write and illustrate for The Yachting Monthly Magazine and also became a correspondent for The Graphic. As both artist and writer he eventually self-illustrated more than thirty books featuring his travels throughout Europe, India and Mesopotamia in addition to illustrating for authors including Hilaire Belloc and Rudyard Kipling.

It was at this stage in my research I suddenly realised another aspect of my attraction to this book. As a child travelling on the Southern Railway trains from Bournemouth to London and on the more local trains around Wimborne, Poole and Blandford, I always remember being fascinated by the panels of paintings hanging in the carriages. They always seemed to entice you to travel, depicting the landscapes of the Southern Railway region and sometimes to more distant areas of the British Isles.

It was in fact Donald Maxwell’s watercolours which became quite renowned as carriage prints on the Southern Railway, those wonderfully atmospheric landscape prints we all looked at through the pipe smoke of our carriage companions. He was just one of many artists who became established in this field and some of his art was produced as large wall posters which we once viewed through drifting steam and soot splattered windows as the train pulled into busy railway platforms. Unfortunately it was 1936 when Southern Railway realised the potential of carriage prints, the very year Donald Maxwell died.

In his book Donald Maxwell reveals the atmosphere of the landscapes featured in ten Hardy novels. He points out that ‘as an artist it would not be enough merely to produce a topographical guide of the places named in each novel and to leave the reader with a photographic imprint of them complete in every detail’. He adds ‘a photographer would do this better than I’.

In fact not long after starting this ‘artists anthology’ as he describes it, he had the opportunity of discussing the matter with Thomas Hardy himself at Max Gate. During this meeting he clearly established the novels and landscapes he was to paint. In his eloquent terms Donald Maxwell describes his ‘endeavour is to show not only the scenes and backgrounds of these stories, but to show each, where possible, in the light and ‘mood’ in which it occurs in the narrative’. He provides a particular poignant example from ‘Tess of the D’Urbevilles’. ‘I have drawn Stonehenge, the last scene of Tess’s tragic flight, not to enumerate the Druid stones in all their architectural wonder but under the grim, cold light of hopeless dawn, relentless and with no appeal from the doom the fates are weaving’.

When relating to the novel ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ Maxwell describes Hardy as having very pleasant memories of Stinsford or Mellstock in the book. He goes on to describe ‘This was the place of his boyhood and when he builds his house (Max Gate) it is within an easy stroll of Stinsford and the place where Hardy wished to be laid to rest when his work was done’. Today of course his ashes lie in Westminster Abbey, only his heart lies in Stinsford churchyard and as Maxwell so beautifully describes it ‘his heart is lying within sound of the crystal streams and murmuring trees of his beloved village’.

Regrettably, in this article there is not the time or space to travel with Donald Maxwell throughout these atmospheric Hardy landscapes but his images certainly do justice to the writing’s of our County’s famous writer.

As a photographer I fully appreciate how difficult it is to interpret the words and atmosphere of descriptive writing. As an artist and writer Donald Maxwell has beautifully captured both the scenes and the words of Thomas Hardy.

This book is now one of my most prized possessions and has certainly inspired me to go in search of Dorset’s atmospheric landscapes with the words of Thomas Hardy always present in my mind.

A search in antiquarian bookshops will no doubt produce a copy of Donald Maxwell’s ‘The Landscapes of Thomas Hardy’. It contains 80 pages, 12 colour plates, line drawings and maps to end papers. The book also describes each of the ten novels with a discussion of each story and the artist’s vision of Hardy’s words and descriptions of the villages and landscapes.

I would like to acknowledge OCTOPUS BOOKS for their kind permission to produce selected prints from the original CASSELL publication of 1928.