British Landscapes: A Sense of Place shows how ideas of scenery have evolved across 300 years of art

The new exhibition of British landscapes at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester features 160 works by some 60 artists. These span from Thomas Gainsborough and the local Smith brothers in the 18th century to the inner-city wastelands of Prunella Clough in the 1990s.

Yet, in an exhibition drawn entirely drawn from Pallant House’s own collections, there are inevitable emphases and gaps. Scottish and Welsh artists are probably better represented than Scottish and Welsh landscapes.

Apart from a collage of Bolton in 1937 by Julian Trevelyan, made while assisting the early work of Mass Observation – a social research initiative that documented everyday life in British towns through writing, photography and visual records – the north of England is largely represented by wintry views of Wharfedale. The Midlands and East Anglia are equally underrepresented.

This exhibition is not about British, or even English landscapes, but about how a broad range of British artists responded to the landscapes they chose to depict.

The spirit of place

Entering the exhibition, I passed some striking works by Graham Sutherland and Edward Bawden. Bawden and Eric Ravilious are unsurprisingly well-represented in this show. Yet it jarred to be told that they moved into nearby Great Bardfield in 1932 “with their wives”. After all, Charlotte Bawden and Tirzah Garwood were themselves significant artists, albeit not of landscapes.

Happily, the same room includes Cumberland Landscape (Boothby) (1926) by Winifred Nicholson. She, alongside others including Barbara Hepworth and the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, ensure that women’s contributions are represented.

Read more: How Yorkshire influenced the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore

Yet the star of that room, and of the show, is Paul Nash. Nash’s intense relationship to landscape informs the subtitle to this exhibition (A Sense of Place), exploring as it does artistic endeavours to capture what Nash referred to as the genius loci (or the spirit of place).

That intensity had a more sombre side. A whole room is devoted to wood engraving and printmaking – an artform Nash and many of his contemporaries turned to after the first world war. The stark lines and contrasts of light and shade evoked the sense of place felt by Nash after his harrowing experiences as a war artist.

His powerful study of the battlefield, Void (1918), which depicts a battlefield stripped bare except for the debris of war, is displayed alongside his dark and shadowy Path into the Wood (1921). Nash’s accompanying text observes: “Before light came, black was. The void was darkness … Without hot shafts of sun or the moon’s radiance the world is not seen.”

What artists saw was a country transformed by war. They turned to the countryside for comfort, trying to capture its disappearing character and preserve a sense of what was being lost.

Six years after the founding of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in 1926, Clare Leighton produced her homage to vanishing rural crafts in The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry (1932). This took a society already becoming estranged from the land through the various seasonal activities of farming communities in exquisite detail. For me, her powerfully built ploughman was one of the highlights of the exhibition, conveying in his posture an intimate relationship with the land that we have increasingly lost.

Tellingly, Edward Wadsworth’s Ladle Slag: Old Hill 1 (1919) is almost the only depiction of the industrial Midlands. Before 1914, Wadsworth had been part of Vorticism – a movement that celebrated the energy, speed, and mechanical power of the modern industrial world. After the war, however, this enthusiasm gave way to a greater sensitivity to the human and environmental costs of industry.

Ironically, commerce was one of the drivers of this shift. Some of the most iconic of English scenes created by Bawden and others were book dust jackets. Even more significant in conveying an imaginary of a rural England well-stocked with beauty spots were the Shell Guides for the growing army of middle-class motorists. Nash was acutely aware of the tension between the tourism he, Sutherland and others encouraged by their contributions to these and the conservation of the England they valued.

Arguably it was in responding to these tensions and postwar uncertainties that a distinctive approach to landscape emerged.

Landscapes and national identity

Interwar British art continued to be influenced by Continental movements, such as surrealism, which Nash was drawn to in the 1930s. Yet it was a modernism tempered by a poignant and affectionate attempt to capture the essence of landscapes that seemed under threat. With few exceptions, capturing these landscapes required a muted palette, maybe because of the rainy weather of these islands.

In general, these landscapes all almost invariably reflected human presence. A staple of the English country scene is often a steeple, such as that seen in Walter Sickert’s Chagford Across Fields (1916), an unsettlingly peaceful scene contrasting with the contemporary slaughter on the Somme.

The works by Ravilious, in whom there has been such an upsurge in interest in recent years, include even more ancient evidence of human activity. His Cerne Abbas Giant (1939) is seen through barbed wire. It’s rendered in earth browns to reflect the way it was turfed over to prevent it acting as a landmark for the Luftwaffe.

Capturing the man-made nature of the English landscape means the term is interpreted elastically here to incorporate seascapes, skyscapes, gardens and what Clough called “urbscapes”. It is taken to include activities such as those illustrated in Edward Bouverie-Hoyton’s Hedging and Ditching (1926). While this shows how much of the landscape of southern England was manufactured, the paucity of postwar material means that the grubbing out of thousands of miles of hedgerows since 1945 goes unrecorded here.

Instead, the exhibition suggests that there was a shift towards abstraction. All landscapes are abstract collages of light, shade, form and colour from a distance. The particularities of a scene that had moved Ravilious became the blocks of pigment used by Ivon Hitchens in works such as Distant Light on Dark & Dark through Light (1968). This was not the depiction of a vista, but an emotional response to it.

In painting in this way, Hitchens was nonetheless still seeking to express the spirit of place that is the defining theme of this engrossing exhibition.

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place is at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until November 1 2026.

Pippa Catterall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.