The Enduring Landscape

by The Colomb Art Gallery / Tuesday 18th of February, 2020

From the romantic traditions of John Constable to the technicoloured dreamscapes of David Hockney, the rural landscape, both in its changing and everlasting forms, has fed artistic impulse since the dawning of art history.

What then, we may ask ourselves, is the enduring appeal of the natural world to artists and collectors?

The necessities of modern life often call for us to spend our time in areas entirely absent of nature’s greenery and wildlife. We dash through concrete jungles and stagnate in grey office blocks. We stare at the steering wheel while sitting in traffic and shuffle in the queue for our morning coffee. The loss therein is something commonly felt but rarely recognised: an innate yearning for the sound of the wind as it rushes across the valley, for trees brimming with birdsong and for the wide, open blue sky, uncut and uninhibited by a city skyline.

While it may not always be practical to drop everything and head for the hills, filling your home with the timeless, restorative presence of a painted landscape does not only add beauty, but invites mindfulness. To begin each day with the sight of Edward Hersey’s lucid, bucolic pastures, or Michael John Ashcroft’s earthen, windswept moorlands, is to take a small piece of nature’s unaccountable splendour into our daily lives.

To view the gallery's collection of landscape paintings, visit our Country Scenes page.