Britain’s landscape has long been “a source of inspiration for artists”, whether the countryside, the coastline or the sprawl of “growing towns and cities”, said Tara Joshi in The Observer. This new exhibition at Pallant House records the various ways in which painters, printmakers and sculptors have captured the “sense and spirit of place” in our surroundings.
Bringing together works by more than 60 artists, it takes in much more than pictures of “pretty rolling hills”, instead encompassing “stories of labour, memory and myth”, and styles from romanticism to surrealism to pure abstraction.
As is often the case at Pallant House, it focuses on artists who espoused a particularly British form of modernism – Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash are all present. Scenes of pastoral tranquillity clash with visions of “monstrous trees”, “almost flesh-like” terrain and “landscapes that seem post-apocalyptic”.
The show begins with the 18th-century “picturesque” movement and the Golden Age of the English watercolour, said Laura Freeman in The Times, featuring artists such as William Gilpin, John Sell Cotman and J.M.W. Turner. The real focus, however, is on the 20th century. Its first decade saw artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth revering the machine as an engine of progress; landscape painting seemed a “quaint” pursuit.
Yet following the industrial slaughter of the First World War, painters discovered “a new impulse to cherish” an environment beyond the cities. Paul Nash, recovering from the Western Front, painted ancient sites such as Avebury in Wiltshire and the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. Edward Bawden designed wallpaper mimicking the patterning of the fields. A new boom in motor touring led to illustrated guide books for Shell, employing many of these artists.
In this “gently elegiac show, rapture and sadness go hand in hand”. The growth of new developments is a recurring theme: Ravilious depicted a new bungalow beside a red-brick school.
There are a fair few “second-rate exhibits”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Many British modernists were mediocre, ripping off “stronger talents”, deploying an ugly palette or fetishising rural customs to the point of sentimentality. The best work, by contrast, has an “idiosyncratic poetry”, finding “strangeness in the familiar”.
There’s a “first-rate” Ravilious watercolour of the Cerne Abbas Giant, turfed over so as not to offer the Luftwaffe a navigational landmark; it’s hidden behind a barbed-wire fence, “as if Britain’s primeval id had been cordoned off”.
Other highlights include five panoramic semi-abstract paintings by Ivon Hitchens and a “vast” vision of the Thames Estuary by Michael Andrews, painted shortly before his death in 1995. It’s “otherworldly”, like a depiction of the hereafter. It makes for a fine ending to this uneven, but interesting show.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, W Sussex. Until 1 November