{"id":691733,"date":"2026-05-25T01:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T01:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/691733\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T01:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T01:58:09","slug":"the-landscapes-that-tell-us-about-the-british-postwar-mindset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/691733\/","title":{"rendered":"The landscapes that tell us about the British postwar mindset"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a Posy Simmonds cartoon called The National Character: A Love of Poetry. I think of it every time I reach the brow of a hill on\u00a0a walk. In each scene of the strip, a new party of ramblers comes across some daffodils. \u201cOh look!\u201d says the first: \u201ca\u00a0host of golden daffodils!\u201d\u00a0\u201cI wandered lonely as a cloud\u2026\u201d says the next. \u201cHow\u2019s\u00a0it go? Something\u00a0something\u00a0crowd of daffodils.\u201d And the next. \u201cLook!\u00a0A host of golden\u2026\u201d And the next. \u201cHelp me, Jessica\u2026\u00a0how\u00a0does it go? I wandered something as a cloud\u2026 something over hill\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0a brilliantly observed tease on the way we Brits feel about our landscape. We may fold and unfold our Ordnance Survey maps on the way, but vales and hills and lakes and trees are so much more than geography. <\/p>\n

You would have to climb a very remote mountain to find a corner of the British landscape that has not been memorialised in art or poetry. Every weekend walk calls up fragments of half-forgotten verse. Over hill, over dale, thorough brush, thorough briar\u2026 The sedge has withered from the lake\u2026 In England\u2019s green and pleasant land.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each of us will have our index. Driving down the M4 to visit my brother and sister-in-law there is a moment when Windsor Castle appears above the motorway. I always think first of Paul Sandby\u2019s Windsor watercolours and then of John Piper\u2019s glowering turrets and George VI\u2019s famous remark: \u201cYou seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.\u201d <\/p>\n

On a family holiday to Romney Marsh last year we were caught out by the one rotten week in a cloudless summer. We took our buckets and spades to Dymchurch, where the wind whipped the sand in columns across the beach.<\/p>\n

I consoled myself, while attempting to shelter two children under one Barbour, with the thought that this was indeed the harsh and battering Dymchurch Paul Nash had captured in his lithographs. I cannot encounter a chalk figure, whether it\u2019s the Long Man of Wilmington or the White Horse at Uffington, without seeing it side by side in my mind\u2019s eye with an Eric Ravilious watercolour.<\/p>\n

It is a well-established phenomenon. Even the greats felt it. Painting in Suffolk, John Constable remarked: \u201cI fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"IllustrationWittenham by Paul Nash, 1935<\/p>\n

\u201cA sense of place\u201d is the guiding force of Pallant House\u2019s summer exhibition, curated by the gallery\u2019s director, Simon Martin,\u00a0which opens in Chichester on May 30. If you are taking the train, don\u2019t read a book, don\u2019t scroll on your phone: look out of the window all the way. Gathering together works by more than 60 British artists, the exhibition illuminates the emotional, psychological and cultural responses connected to particular spots.<\/p>\n

It begins in the 18th century with the \u201cpicturesque\u201d moment popularised by such artists as William Gilpin, who wrote of \u201cthat kind of beauty which would look well in a picture\u201d, and the watercolourists Alexander Cozens, his son John Robert Cozens, John Sell Cotman and JMW Turner \u2014 heroes of the \u201cGolden Age of English watercolour\u201d.<\/p>\n

It was in the 18th century that the idea of genius loci, or the \u201cspirit of the place\u201d, became a principle for architects, garden designers and painters. Alexander Pope would have great fun sending up the designers who \u201cconsult\u201d the genius of the place, swear \u201clet Nature never be forgot\u201d then get on with raising whatever buildings, follies, grottoes and statues their clients can afford.<\/p>\n

The focus of the exhibition, though, is the 20th century. After the Industrial Revolution there was every reason to expect that landscape painting would become a quaint and acquainted pursuit. The modern world was the metropolis. What place for hay stooks in the age of the machine? <\/p>\n

The story told in the exhibition is pleasingly counterintuitive. The British landscape tradition, far from dying back, put forth new shoots. It took on the visual language of modernism while maintaining a deep devotion to the land.<\/p>\n

Before the war, Martin explains in the accompanying catologue, machines had been seen as a force for progress by artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth and CRW Nevinson. \u201cVorticism\u201d looked to cubism in Paris and futurism in Italy for a hard-edged, fragmented visual style that rejected the past for a revolutionary manner with, in Lewis\u2019s words, \u201cthe rigid reflections of steel\u201d.<\/p>\n

Artists who served in the First World War and who saw at first hand the appalling destruction of life and landscape wreaked by mechanised warfare drew away from this imagery of struts and steel. Paul Nash, an official war artist, wrote home to his wife from Ypres in Belgium of the devastation before him. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.\u201d Nothing could have been less feeble or inarticulate than paintings such as\u00a0We Are Making a New World, in which Nash memorialised the scarred and lifeless landscape of the front.<\/p>\n

The aftermath of the war brought a new impulse to cherish and record the countryside. Men who had seen fields turned into no man\u2019s lands must have looked on meadows and downland with eyes desperate for the solace of pasture and harvest.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when Paris was becoming ever more avant garde, many British artists turned their gaze instead to the sea and the coast, the downs and the high hills, and towards a new and faintly alarming subject: the\u00a0suburbs.<\/p>\n

The hardy took their watercolours out in all weathers, the more fair-weather sought terraces and rooms with a view. \u201cI always work from the window of a house if it is at all possible,\u201d wrote the poet and watercolourist David Jones. \u201cI can\u2019t paint in the wind. I like the indoors-outdoors, contained but limitless feeling of windows and doors.\u201d Two of his lovely, loose, in-and-out watercolours are included in the show.<\/p>\n

Nash, recovering from the horrors of the war, painted at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire, at Dymchurch and at ancient sites such as Avebury in Wiltshire and the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, which he described as \u201ca beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten\u201d. You need a little notebook in your pocket as you go round this exhibition for jotting down ideas for future day trips.<\/p>\n

\"IllustrationSussex River, near Midhurst by Ivon Hitchens, 19652026 The Estate of Ivon Hitchens<\/p>\n

Edward Bawden designed wallpapers that celebrated the neat patterning of fields (I have a sample of his \u201cTree and Cow\u201d framed above my desk). Ravilious recorded a new bungalow (a word as worrying as \u201csuburbs\u201d) being built beside a red-brick village school. There was a boom in guides to the countryside and an accompanying run of stylish advertisements for the train lines and petrol companies that would get you there. The campaign \u201cYou Can Be Sure of Shell\u201d employed artists including Nash, Graham Sutherland and Vanessa Bell.<\/p>\n

Some expressed dismay at the encroachment of new housing developments. The architect Clough Williams-Ellis, known today principally as the creator of the village of Portmeirion (the backdrop to the 1960s TV series\u00a0The Prisoner), wrote a polemic called\u00a0England and the Octopus\u00a0with a cover design showing an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a picture-perfect English village.<\/p>\n

Developers were one enemy, the Second World War brought another. The threat of invasion created new anxieties and new urgency. Kenneth Clark set up both the War Artists Advisory Committee to create a visual record of the Second World War and the Recording Britain scheme, which commissioned artists to document the British landscape and its architecture before it was gone altogether. More than 1,500 watercolours and drawings would fill this \u201cpictorial Domesday\u201d sketchbook.<\/p>\n

In this gently elegiac show, rapture and sadness go hand in hand. Each painting, etching and watercolour inspires a sense of recovery (do you remember when we walked that path and how the mist came in?) or discovery (show me the way! when can we go?) or loss. Is Nash\u2019s Wittenham still as he painted it or will I find a bungalow where the trees once stood?
British Landscapes: A Sense of Place is at Pallant House, Chichester, May 30-Nov 1, pallant.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a Posy Simmonds cartoon called The National Character: A Love of Poetry. I think of it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-691733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}