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Britain’s ever-changing pastures green have long been a source of inspiration for artists, be they the countryside, the coastlines, or even the peaks and troughs of growing towns and cities crisscrossing on the horizon. A new exhibition at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place, charts how painters, printmakers and sculptors conveyed the sense and spirit of place innate in the scenes surrounding us from the late-18th century through to the end of the 20th.
Understandably, that encompasses many different themes; these are not just pretty rolling hills, but stories of labour, memory and myth. With the images selected here, we can think about the echoes of conflict – or what the painter Graham Sutherland described as “exultant strangeness” in a 1942 essay about the Pembrokeshire landscape at the height of the second world war. “Sutherland’s phrase perfectly captures the essence of mid-century British modernism in which artists blended surrealism, neo-romanticism and abstraction to capture the uncanny, mythic and often haunting vitality of the natural world,” says Simon Martin, director of the gallery.
Indeed, many of these works by the likes of Sutherland himself, along with those by Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash, are imbued with the unsettling disquiet that came in the aftermath of the two world wars. Hence we have monstrous trees, terrain that is almost fleshlike, landscapes that seem post-apocalyptic. Martin says: “Across the exhibition, landscape becomes uncanny precisely because it refuses to remain still.”
British Landscapes: A Sense of Place opens at Pallant House Gallery on 30 May
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