This exhibition takes as its starting point the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest, which gave the common man rights to glean from royal land.

The process of collecting from the land is key to the work of the lead artists in the show: the celebrated British sculptor, Henry Moore and innovative ceramic artist Ewen Henderson. Both artists used the land as a source of inspiration and physical material for their sculptural work.

Sculpture and drawings by Moore will be displayed alongside work by Henderson and fifteen other artists including Paul Nash, John Piper and Evelyn Gibbs which distort the perceived pastoral nature of British landscape.

The exhibition presents the more dramatic aspects of rural environments and in doing so places Moore within a visceral, tumultuous history of landscape.

Visit the exhibition website here.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.