Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850―1950 (British Museum) - Softcover

'One of the best surveys of British landscape painting you are likely to find' - The Artist 'Not merely a catalogue, but stands alone as a very interesting read' - The Lady 'Fascinating and original' - Times Literary Supplement

The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact – landscape as ‘places of the mind’, as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it – is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum’s impressive collection, this book explores artists’ spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later 19th and early 20th centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time.
Published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, this book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known 20th-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.

Table of Contents

Introduction · The ‘tormentingly elusive’ art of drawing landscape, Kim Sloan · A new ‘golden age’ : The ‘modern’ landscape watercolour, Jessica Feather · South Country and other Imagined Places, Anna Gruetzner Robins · Representation and reality in West Country landscapes, Sam Smiles · Some Versions of Pastoral, Frances Carey