British Landscapes: A Sense of Place

This major exhibition will bring the British landscape to life through the eyes of some of the 20th century's most inspiring artists. It will explore works from 1910 to 1970 that reimagined the countryside and coastlines of the British Isles as powerful symbols of cultural identity, creativity and resilience in a turbulent century. The exhibition will capture how landscapes reflected changing ways of life, national identity and wartime anxieties.Drawn from the Gallery's renowned Modern British collection and prestigious long-term loans, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place will showcase works by celebrated figures including Ivon Hitchens' Curved Barn (1922) showing a barn at Heyshott in Sussex, Graham Sutherland's pastoral etchings of Kent such as Pecken Wood (1925) and The Village (1925), Paul Nash's Wittenham (1935) showing an iron age hill fort in Oxfordshire, Eric Ravilious' Cerne Abbas Giant (1939) showing the Wiltshire chalk figure covered with earth at the start of the Second World War, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Snow at Wharfedale (1957), an abstract response to the Yorkshire landscape.Spanning British Post-Impressionism, the pastoral printmaking revival of the 1920s, Surrealism, and the emergence of the bold
postwar abstraction of St Ives and beyond, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place offers a fresh look at how art reflected the shifting landscape of a nation.