Force of nature

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October

Sutherland gets a good showing in Part 1, not just his prints, but also a trio of oils on the theme of lanes and woodland pathways. Paul Nash, one of the greatest of British 20th-century landscape painters, is represented by delightful early works such as ‘Under the Hill’ (1912) and by major paintings such as ‘Landscape of the Megaliths’ (1934), ‘November Moon’ (1942) and ‘Eclipse of the Sunflower’ (1945). Please note the presence of such lesser lights as Paul Drury, Joseph Webb and Edgar Holloway, and comparative unknowns like Graham Robertson, John Lefevre and James Sellars. Good to see S. R. Badmin and John Elwyn too. The range is impressive, though I could have done with more than a single image by the brothers Spencer, Stanley and Gilbert, and the solitary Hitchens. Perhaps the idea needed to be focused better? A catch-all survey can give a confused flavour of a period or tendency, while a more discriminating selection can be paradoxically more informative.

However, Part 1 proved very popular in Bath, with nearly 16,000 visitors, many of them returning more than once. It reinforces my belief that the Romantic pastoral strain is the most original and deeply felt of our landscape manifestations in England. It’s not just reactionary nostalgia, but the identification of a powerful source of inspiration in the national psyche. If you still want to see Part 1, you could go to the next and last venue in the exhibition’s tour, Falmouth Art Gallery, where it will run from 20 September until 1 November. But Falmouth has even less space than Bath, so it will be showing a reduced version of the original show. Perhaps better to buy the catalogue (a substantial paperback priced at £19.95), though it is somewhat text-heavy and indigestible, and marred by misprints. The illustrations are also rather small. But I suspect it will be a useful sourcebook for many who do not have ready access to the originals.