BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS: A HISTORY AND GAZETTEER

Landscape painting has always been the distinctive British art form which, despite whims and fashions, has remained fairly constant over 250 years. Yet, with its woods and waterfalls, its ruined abbeys and wild mountain scenery, its labourers stooking corn or tending cattle, it has all too often been a lie to current reality, an idealised image, a georgic myth to mask a grimmer truth, as Charles Hemming's entertaining history, which forms the first part of this book, reveals

It follows the course of landscape painting from its early evolution from prospect painting to its emergence as an art form with painters like Francis Place, Thomas Robins and Matthew Read, through the era of the Industrial Revolution and Romanticism to its golden heyday in the Victorian age with painters as diverse as the Pre-Raphaelites, Frith, Leighton, Waterhouse and the English Impressionists, and through the twentieth century, from Roger Fry and Paul Nash to Richard Eurich and the Brotherhood of Ruralists of the 1970s

The book includes over 450 artists, some giants, some who deserve to be better known. While the Gazetteer, which forms the second part, covers over 280 places where landscape painters have lived and worked