British Landscapes: A Sense of Place coming to Chichester’s Pallant House

The exhibition will explore how artists from the late 18th century to the end of the 20th century have captured the distinctive character, emotional resonance and enduring spirit of place found in Britain’s landscapes.

Spokeswoman Carrie Rees said: “Bringing together works by more than 60 artists, the exhibition will trace how painters, printmakers and sculptors responded to the countryside, coastlines, towns and cities of the British Isles – not simply as scenery, but as places shaped by memory, myth, labour, conflict and imagination.

“From quiet lanes and chalk hills to industrial sites and abstracted coastal forms, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place will reveal how landscape has been central to British visual culture and to ideas of national identity.

“The exhibition will trace a lineage from 18th-century master Thomas Gainsborough, and the golden age of British watercolour – with works by John Robert Cozens, John Varley and John Sell Cotman – to some of the most evocative landscape art of the 20th century.

“Artists including Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious, Ivon Hitchens, Barbara Hepworth, Michael Andrews and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham reimagined Britain’s fields, coastlines and settlements as sites of psychological intensity, poetic symbolism and modernist experiment.

“At the heart of the exhibition will be the idea of a sense of place: the deep emotional, cultural and imaginative bond between people and the landscapes they inhabit. For artists working through periods of rapid social change, industrialisation and two world wars, the British landscape became a powerful means of expressing belonging, loss, resilience and renewal. Inviting visitors to reflect on the landscapes that have shaped Britain’s imagination – places layered with history and emotion – the exhibition will speak not only to what Britain looks like, but how it felt to live here.”

Ivon Hitchens’ Curved Barn (1922), painted in rural Sussex

Paul Nash’s wood-engravings and lithographs of the seawall at Dymchurch, Kent in the aftermath of the First World War and Wittenham (1935), exploring the spirit of place of an ancient Iron Age hill fort in Oxfordshire

Graham Sutherland’s pastoral etchings of Kent and Sussex from the mid-1920s and his watercolours of Pembrokeshire painted at the outbreak of the Second World War

Eric Ravilious’ poignant wartime image of the Cerne Abbas Giant (1939), partially buried to protect it from enemy bombers

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s Snow at Wharfedale (1957), an abstract response to the Yorkshire landscape.

“The exhibition will unfold thematically and chronologically. Early sections will explore the legacy of Romanticism and the profound impact of the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which introduced British artists to Cezanne, Van Gogh and Seurat, sparking new ways of seeing the land. Works by Camden Town artists Spencer Gore and Walter Sickert, pacifist Mark Gertler and Vorticist Helen Saunders will reveal how continental modernist ideas were adapted to distinctly British settings, even amid the disruptions of the First World War.

“A major section will be devoted to the revival of etching and wood engraving in the interwar years when artists including F L Griggs, Paul Nash, Clare Leighton and Graham Sutherland turned to printmaking to evoke a pastoral, often nostalgic vision of Britain, informed by romantic 19th century artists such as Samuel Palmer. These intimate works, rich in atmosphere, capture villages, farms and working landscapes at a moment of profound change, recording ways of life on the cusp of disappearance.

“The exhibition will conclude with postwar abstraction, focusing on artists working in places far from London – St Ives, Sussex and other creative enclaves – where landscape inspired new abstract languages. John Hubbard’s Cornish Landscape (1968) and Alan Reynolds’ Farm Buildings, A View (1958) as well as works by Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, will show how the physical experience of place continued to shape British art, even as representation gave way to form, rhythm and colour.

“The exhibition will culminate with works that draw on the history of British landscape art and the inspiration of Turner and Whistler, to render a moving evocation of the meeting place of land, sea, culture, and emotion. These will include Norman Ackroyd’s evocative etchings and aquatints of the coastlines of Western Scotland as he followed the locations of the Shipping Forecast, alongside Michael Andrews’ final work, Thames Painting: The Estuary (1994).

“Displayed alongside British Landscapes: A Sense of Place will be Haroun Hayward: Path Through Trees, a contemporary response to the exhibition. Hayward’s vibrant new body of work draws on the artists and ideas explored in British Landscapes, weaving together art history, landscape and the cultural energy of rave, graffiti and 1990s dance music, offering a fresh perspective on how place continues to shape identity today.”