The British Landscape 1920-1950

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One aspect of the new style was making woodland more interesting and ornamental, leading to the establishment of the woodland garden as a distinct type. This took several forms, one of which was helped by the developing Gothic revival. Horace Walpole, a great promoter of the English landscape garden style, praised Painshill in Surrey, whose varied features included a shrubbery with American plants, and a sloping "Alpine Valley" of conifers, as one of the best of the new style of "forest or savage gardens". [19] This was a style of woodland aiming at the sublime, a newly-fashionable concept in literature and the arts, or at the least to be picturesque, another new term. It really required steep slopes, even if not very high, along which paths could be made revealing dramatic views, by which contemporary viewers who had read Gothic novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) were very ready to be impressed. [20] The three men's attitudes towards the prints that advertised their names differed, too. Although Gainsborough never sold a print from his own hand he was technologically curious, happily experimenting with the differences between etching, soft-ground etching and aquatint as means of reproducing the effects of drawing or painting. Prints as a marketable commodity were of less interest to him.

Cliffs provide a unique vertical habitat that is on the one hand exposed to the elements yet on the other it is difficult of access for predators. Hardy seabirds such as enormous goose-sized Gannets, dapper Guillemots and Razorbills, and gliding Northern Fulmars make cliffs their summer home, breeding there in safety yet with easy access to the sea and its resources. In some spots there may be colourful Atlantic Puffins too.So it was through emulation rather than a burgeoning of native spirit that what another poet, William Cowper, described as "Italian light on English walls" came to be painted. When it did, it appeared in several varieties. The birth of British landscape painting was heralded by an interest in aesthetic theory too. In 1757 Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which, in turn, towards the end of the century, led to the theory of the picturesque championed by William Gilpin. For landscape artists, the sublime was essentially the evocation of awe and terror, the beautiful meant soft and aesthetically pleasing, while the picturesque – literally "in the manner of a picture" – was defined as irregular, ragged and asymmetrical.

Christian Hoiberg is living the escapist’s dream. He is a Norwegian photographer currently based north of the Arctic Circle.

Whisky Galore! (1949)

Inspired by the romanticism of Richard Wilson, the evolution of JMW Turner’s work is evocative of the early stages of contemporary landscape art. Aussie living in London reveals four British things she thought were weird after making the move - but now finds 'completely normal' A new exhibition which has at its heart surprisingly a reproduction of his work Slave ship. The original was said to be too fragile for the journey from Boston. The exhibition opened last month and runs from the 28th of Oct to the 7th of March 2021 at Tate Britain.