This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting

Britain has a rich and diverse landscape,

ceaselessly changing with the seasons and the lives of its people.

It has provided inspiration to artists for centuries.

Painting the landscape is a familiar occupation.

The artist carries his paints, brushes and easel

out into the countryside

and faithfully renders the view he sees before him.

But even when a painter sets out with just such an intention,

the reality is more complex.

Every painter brings their own unique vision to the canvas.

The time in which they live,

the political, social and economic circumstances of the age

and their own personal situation

will all manifest themselves in the final picture.

Landscape painting is a discipline in which British artists

are acknowledged to have created some of the greatest work

made anywhere in the world.

But it was not born here.

We imported, borrowed and learnt how to paint the landscape.

In the process,

we recorded the history of our country and its people...

..the value placed on its land...

..and the aesthetic and cultural worth of our vision of ourselves.

Until the 1600s,

the British landscape was all but ignored by painters,

and British painters were all but ignored

by those with the money to commission art.

The break with Rome under Henry VIII

cut Britain off from the cultural life of the continent,

and the patronage of the Church,

which did so much to sustain the arts in Catholic Europe.

Even our royal portraits were painted by foreigners.

Hans Holbein, who painted this portrait of Henry, was German,

and though his work tell us so much about Tudor Britain,

he had no interest in our landscape.

I guess it's one of the ironies of a genre of art,

thought of as being so British, that you have to look beyond Britain

for the origins of British landscape painting.

And it derives from Flemish art and Dutch art of an earlier period.

The first British monarch to show a serious concern

for the artistic health of his nation was Charles I

and as if to make up for a previous deficiency,

it became an obsession for him.

Charles greatly admired the work of Flemish painters

like Peter Paul Rubens.

And was delighted when, in 1629, Rubens arrived in London.

But his motives were not artistic.

This was a complex period in European politics

but if you need directions, ask a historian.

Rubens comes to London, not as an artist, but as a diplomat.

He's working for the Spanish crown and he's come to enlist the help

of one of the more important Protestant kings of Europe,

King Charles, to bring peace to Europe.

Rubens painted this allegorical picture during his negotiations,

portraying Charles as St George.

Charles wanted to sit for a portrait by Rubens,

but given that Britain and Spain were still at war,

that would have been completely unacceptable so he made do with this.

What you see here is a bucolic vision of harmony.

This is why it's not just an allegory,

it's actually a fascinating landscape painting.

Rubens comes to England as an ambassador and he's very struck.

He writes home, he writes off to Spain saying,

"This is a land of extreme beauty and peace.

"There hasn't been any fighting inside Britain for centuries.

"It's full of art lovers, antiquarians, collectors.

"King Charles himself, first among them.

"The greatest art lover who ever sat on the English throne."

He portrays the king in a noble guise

and divine providence is smiling on his land.

The heavens are beaming down. You can see what looks like Lambeth Palace,

perhaps Westminster Abbey, Palace of Whitehall, Banqueting House.

It really is a collage.

Oh, yes, it is a collage.

It's a fantasy, I tell you. It's not in any way a realistic painting.

There's some buildings here

and I'd like to put them here.

It's like...they're buildings along the Thames, actually

and this is somewhere around Aldgate or Islington or somewhere like that.

It's a beautiful landscape in the background there

and there's a Thames-like river running through it,

which accentuates the depth in the picture.

And yet, I can't help feeling somehow, looking at this painting,

the more I looked at it, I kept wondering what made this painting

appear so phoney to me.

It's all flattery.

He's being a diplomat. He's being...

He's sucking up to people and making...

..making them feel good about themselves.

The difference between Rubens and me is...

he's a two-faced son of a bitch, actually.

What I think Rubens did was to flatter...Charles I.

He wouldn't be doing what Private Eye were doing in the '60s,

you know, what I was doing then, in the '60s.

What I'm trying to do is insult him.

Today, we'd really think about this as a political cartoon.

As WikiLeaks has demonstrated,

diplomats are rather candid in their reports back home

and indeed Rubens makes all sorts of judgements about Charles

that are fascinating to a historian.

The great tragedy of this painting is it's a vision

that never came to pass.

In fact, it contributed, really, to Charles' downfall.

Charles made peace with Spain

but, in doing so, he won the undying enmity

of the majority of his subjects.

The Englishmen did not want this harmonious vision of a united Europe.

He ain't half...

a clever bloke.

I still don't really like him.

Rubens's trip to Britain marked a turning point in his career.

At the age of 53, he gave up diplomacy

and retired to the country.

Rather less conventionally, he got married to a 16-year-old model.

But despite Britain's Eurosceptic outlook,

Rubens had spotted one important fact.

This was a beautiful country.

That simple truth was the foundation for all that was to follow.

Charles, meanwhile, continued to focus rather more on art

than on his increasingly resentful subjects,

and soon found a replacement for Rubens.

Anthony Van Dyck, who had been Rubens's assistant,

arrived in London 1632

to take up the position of Principal Painter in Ordinary

to their majesties.

In an early Royal commission, Van Dyck depicts Charles's nephew,

Prince Rupert.

Through the arch behind him, there's a very English-looking hillside,

suggesting that Van Dyck had done a bit of research.

Maybe he was sketching for his own pleasure

but, because we know that this tree appears in the background

of one of his paintings,

the portrait of Prince Rupert,

it could also be that, from the beginning,

he already envisaged to build up a repertoire

to use in his future paintings.

Van Dyck's pictures of his royal master

were just what Charles was after,

reinforcing the divine right of kings in oil paint.

But however accomplished van Dyck was at painting the landscape,

it was still just a backdrop.

His evident pleasure in depicting the countryside

was something he could only do in a drawing.

The reason why I love drawings so much

is because they offer you a glimpse into the thoughts of an artist.

It's a sort of signature. You're eye-to-eye with the artist,

seeing how he perceived the world around him.

While Van Dyck's opportunities to paint the landscape were scarce,

those of his British contemporaries were almost nonexistent.

With the exception of vanity pictures

of the estates and country mansions of the nobility,

the British showed no interest in paintings of their landscape.

But there were landscapes hanging on the walls inside these houses.

Whilst van Dyck was sketching the countryside around London,

a Frenchman was making a name for himself painting the Roman campagna,

the countryside around Rome.

Right...here we are in the Landscape Room, um...

These paintings were bought by the builder of the house, Thomas Coke,

on his grand tour in Italy.

He had the longest recorded grand tour in history. It was six years.

The most important painter here is Claude Lorrain.

The paintings are these wonderful, sort of, classical landscapes.

At the time,

these paintings wouldn't have been thought of as landscapes.

Instead, they were mythical representations

of stories from classical antiquity.

For example, this is a Greek mythological scene,

Argus Guarding Io.

Such stories gave a sense of moral seriousness

that a simple view of an Italian hillside would not have displayed.

As long as everyone went along with this premise,

Claude could continue to paint the countryside.

He was under no illusions about this ruse himself.

"I sell the landscape," he said.

"The figures are gratis."

Holkham is quite unique, actually,

in the fact that it is really the work of one man,

the builder of the house, Thomas Coke.

He and his friends, all of whom were very learned,

they used to retire to the library and read the great classics

and they would read them in ancient Latin or ancient Greek.

So they all understood the symbolism of various paintings in here.

And then you could look out the window

and you could see the English landscape

that he had moulded in an Italianate style.

Magnificent as the setting of Holkham Hall is,

the idea that you might fashion a little bit of Italy

from the raw materials of England

was most perfectly realised in a valley in Wiltshire.

This is Stourhead,

created by a wealthy banker, Henry Hoare, after his visit to Italy.

His inspiration for this manufactured landscape

was another myth, and another painting by Claude.

This is one of Claude's most famous paintings

in the National Gallery in London.

This is Aeneas at Delos.

In the left foreground, we've got a bridge

and then here is a view of a Pantheon-type building,

as we see over across the lake.

This image is often cited by art historians

as being an obvious precursor

for what Henry Hoare was trying to achieve here in three dimensions,

not on a canvas.

Claude's landscapes came from his imagination

but his art had a powerful effect on men like Henry Hoare.

The immense undertaking involved

in creating a real landscape based on a painting,

underlined the lengths to which a wealthy man could go

to live in Arcadia.

Stourhead was an extraordinary achievement,

creating a landscape that was to inspire artists for centuries

and opening the door for Capability Brown

and the landscape-garden movement that followed.

In displaying their learning in this way,

the British upper classes saw themselves

as embodying all the virtues of the antique past.

Adopting the cultural and political trappings of the Roman Empire,

proclaimed the noble ideals of what was to become the British Empire.

These young men were inculcated in the classics

at English public school, and when they leave, they go on a grand tour

which is a kind of finishing school,

where they take their copies of their Virgil and their Cicero

and their Ovid with them as a kind of portable guidebook to Italy.

Grand tours were also an opportunity to do a bit of shopping for art

to hang on the walls back home.

And the young British "milords" were legendary shopaholics,

buying up anything with an Italian name,

however indifferent the quality.

So where did this leave the aspiring home-grown talent?

The artists had a more fragmented opportunistic relationship

with classical culture.

Basically, it was incredibly difficult for some of them

to even get to Italy.

We know some of them were patronised by wealthy British aristocrats

who actually pay for them to go,

but often we know that it's much more of a social

and economic struggle for them to get by.

This landscape was painted by a British painter, George Lambert.

He certainly knew what was required.

All the elements that made Claude so successful are here.

The soft Italian light and the classical ruins.

George, though, never made it to Italy.

Lambert was not alone in his growing frustration

with the status of British artists in their home market.

Along with his great friend William Hogarth,

he resented the preference for foreign painters

and continental landscapes.

In 1733, he painted this view of Box Hill in Surrey.

It may be the first time a British artist painted a British landscape

for its own sake.

It was not just the background to a portrait.

It showed no country mansion or estate.

It was an accurate representation of a real place

and it still looks pretty much the same today.

In the foreground of Lambert's painting,

some farm labourers are harvesting the corn,

but today, in the same valley, they're harvesting grapes.

In much the same way that English wine

is still seen as something of a novelty in its home market,

Hogarth and Lambert struggled in a British art market

that still had a palate attuned to continental tastes.

Richard Wilson, a well-connected Welshman,

painted this view of Westminster Bridge under construction in 1744.

The undoubted disadvantage of being Welsh and not Italian

was bought home to him when Canaletto moved to London

and painted the same scene.

Wilson decided to make the journey in reverse and moved to Italy.

Once in Rome, he began turning out Arcadian landscapes

with all the hallmarks of a Claude.

His relocation did the trick and he became hugely popular

with the same British aristocrats who had ignored him at home.

After seven years, Wilson returned to Britain,

but he never quite got Italy out of his system,

which was very evident in the pictures he made.

'I think Richard Wilson is being very clever, actually.

'I think he learned a great deal when he was in Rome

'and took what he learned about the classical idealisation

'of the landscape back to appeal to the British passion

'at the time for all things Italian.

'He's looking at the British landscape

'but with that kind of Italian filter.'

This looks like as close as I'm going to get

to perhaps where Richard Wilson would have painted this view from.

Incredibly, actually, it's quite similar.

I can recognise a lot of the main motifs. There's the Holt Bridge.

There's the hills in the distance.

From this point, you can't actually see the church

and also he seems to have exaggerated quite a lot, for artistic purposes,

the rocky escarpment on the right-hand side.

Interestingly, whereas Claude, I feel,

has this kind of serenity about the sky -

it feels like it's going to last forever -

this is kind of slightly wild.

It does have a real kind of British feel about it.

The sky is incredibly similar.

You've got these grey clouds all around

and here the clouds are enveloping the picture.

There's just this little glimpse of this magical moment

where you have this light coming through

and shining down on these three people.

I've always been interested in Claude paintings

and I've recreated a number myself.

I wanted to photograph the landscape around Britain today

but elevating it to the status of Claudian-Arcadian vision.

That's exactly what Richard Wilson is doing.

He's transposing Claude's ideals but then he's making it with a landscape

that people would recognise.

I'm going to take some photographs now myself

to try and construct my own view of the Holt Bridge

and the surrounding area from the reality that I see here.

But using my own artistic licence

to capture what Wilson has captured here.

We have to remember the landscape we see

and it's always filtered, it's always a construction

and it's always been managed.

And so that's quite interesting that now when you come back

and you try and look at a landscape painting in the same spot,

it's changed because the landscape has been managed in a different way

and now we're seeing, in fact, there are more trees than there were

300-400 years ago, which is actually really interesting,

cos you wouldn't expect that.

How the landscape was managed

was a thorny issue throughout the 18th century,

and this controversy was reflected in the way it appeared in paintings.

The portrayal of Britain as a new Rome

never lost its appeal to the aristocracy,

but as the century progressed,

art became affordable to less elevated members of society

who didn't care for fashionable foreign names

and, in any case, preferred to see the land in which they lived

presented in a more familiar guise.

Britain was surely best painted by British artists

who naturally grew up loving it themselves,

and we begin to recognise that our landscape was too beautiful

to play a supporting role.

In 1749, a 22-year-old artist from Sudbury in Suffolk

painted this picture of a country neighbour and his new wife.

Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews

was a thoroughly modern picture with a message.

There is no pretence here. This is not Italy.

We are unmistakeably looking at a Suffolk landscape.

Even the tree under which they are sitting is a native oak.

What's wonderful about being here is that this tree is still growing.

It's fantastic. It's now become one of these marvellous old veterans,

of which we've got a very large number in this country

and which we ought to be very proud of.

But I have to say that, looking at this landscape,

I'm rather amazed really because I'd always thought

that this was Gainsborough painting a real landscape

almost from the place where he had put his easel en plein air

so to speak, but it's actually all a bit different from that.

I walked up that slope and it's much steeper than you might expect

from the painting.

And I think that what Mr Andrews wanted to say

was that here is a very up-to-date, newly-enclosed farmed landscape.

The old way of farming, the beasts wandered around

and you couldn't develop a breed

because, really, they shagged everything.

But here you can breed to improve this strain of animals

and you can even see in the wheat fields here, that it's been drilled.

The old way, you scattered seed, broadcast like that.

Now, with Jethro Tull's seed drill, you could sow it in lines.

That was much more efficient, made better use of the seed.

You could hoe between it and so on and so forth.

But it all looks to me very, very new.

I think hasn't... I think he's only just done it.

And I think that this is the point of the landscape.

I think that he's wanting to show off his new agricultural technology.

I've farmed in Bulmer for 35 years on the land that adjoins Andrews'.

And as a young man, I aspired to apply the same sort of enquiring,

investigative, scientific approach that he was taking.

One reason for me that the painting is so important

is that it shows British agriculture

at the time to be at the forefront of world farming.

And Tolstoy, in War And Peace,

refers to Count Nikolai being interested in English farming,

because English farming, at the time, was the best.

Well, this in 1750 is really the start

of our modern idea of the countryside.

It's somewhere that people go to... enjoy leisure, really.

It's a very, very modern idea. This is a lifestyle painting.

And I could easily imagine this couple, seated here today,

wearing Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies.

He'd have a Purdey under his arm. She'd have her dogs.

And this is a lifestyle that's still very desirable.

You only have to look in the advertisement pages of Country Life

to see that this is the aspirational lifestyle today,

just as much as it was in 1750.

And I think, even the way that he's standing,

it seems to me he's a prosperous comfortable chap. He's had...

a lot of good luck in life, I think, probably.

I could imagine him being in the Tory cabinet today.

Despite devoting over half of the picture to the Suffolk landscape,

Mr And Mrs Andrews is still a portrait.

In the classical league table of artistic value,

a hierarchy handed down from the Italian Renaissance,

landscape was an inferior subject for painters,

coming just ahead of animals and bowls of fruit.

Landscape was really rather looked down upon.

He saw landscape as somewhere where you went to relax.

Not just being in it, but also for himself, drawing it and painting it.

It was almost his own secret pleasure that was done very much for himself.

What you see in the flicker and glitter

and fluid excitement of his painted surfaces

is an idea that this is real emotion which has been conveyed here.

You are kind of buying into a vision of the landscape

which is informed by a notion of sensibility

and formed deeply by a notion of Gainsborough himself

being an artist who, through his manipulation of paint,

is embodying an emotional response to landscape and to nature.

From what we know about Gainsborough, he was something of a radical.

But comes across as a very lovable and likeable figure.

He clearly had a great sense of humour.

And I think he'd be the sort of person that would welcome

all ideas and interpretations and take them as he found them.

The radical ideas that excited Gainsborough

were also having a profound effect on the landscape he painted.

It wasn't just the Industrial Revolution

that was gaining momentum.

New farming methods were revolutionising the countryside too.

In 1778, Gainsborough painted this picture of his friend,

Thomas Coke of Holkham Hall,

one of the greatest agricultural reformers of the day.

He made farming fashionable for the gentry.

And he encouraged all his various farm tenants to improve their land.

We had the Industrial Revolution happening around about the same time

and there was a very real need to feed the country.

And agriculture, there was a need, a necessity for it to change,

to get more efficient.

Despite his success as a portrait painter,

Gainsborough wrote to a friend that he would like,

"To retire to a sweet village

"and spend the fag end of life painting landscapes."

When he died, the corridors of his house were piled high

with these pictures, for which there was no market.

Gainsborough may have had mixed feelings

about painting his wealthy patrons,

but portraiture gave him both financial security

and artistic integrity.

Another gifted landscapist, his near contemporary,

George Stubbs, was less fortunate.

He was a sporting artist.

Stubbs' extraordinary achievement really is to elevate this lowly genre

of sporting art into something which is so aesthetically distinguished.

What we have is a vision of order and clarity,

which is meant to evoke classical painting.

Here is the Duke of Richmond admiring his racehorses

being exercised on his estate at Goodwood.

In much the same way that Gainsborough had been employed

to show off Robert Andrews' modern farming techniques,

Stubbs has been hired to show off the Duke's thoroughbreds.

In both cases, of course, the landscape is the real star.

Today, this same landscape is home to another kind of thoroughbred.

More than any other factor,

it has been the sporting enthusiasms of its various owners

that has shaped the landscape of the Goodwood Estate.

It's fascinating to look at the Stubbs'

and see how little the landscape's changed.

That is exactly where the golf course is now.

That's where they were shooting.

Shooting's played a major part in the landscape.

There's been shooting here for 300 years.

That's preserved the landscape and the woodland

and helped to develop it in a positive way.

It overlooks the sea, the cathedral's still there.

It's changed very, very little.

We've got horseracing in 1801, the cricket, way back in 1727.

Motor racing in 1948.

They've all just grown out of an enthusiasm

to become part of the British summer.

And in that sense, I think they enhanced the landscape

and they've become part of it in their own way.

And we just want to make the most of it

and preserve a truly beautiful piece of England.

Stubbs was not a man to do things by halves.

In order to paint horses better than anyone else ever had,

he rented a remote farmhouse in Lincolnshire

and with the aid of Mrs Stubbs, spent 18 months cutting them up

to see what they were made of.

He brought a similar dedication to the landscapes in which they stood.

Lot 45.

£7 million for this lot. £7 million to start.

The package was irresistible.

At £7,500,000. At £7,500,000.

A winning combination that flattered the animals and their owners...

..and set them in a landscape that flattered Britain

in much the same way.

Last chance. I am selling for £9 million.

Any more?

Sold. £9 million. Thank you very much.

Not bad for a sporting artist.

Towards the end of his career,

Stubbs painted a series of rural landscapes

with agricultural workers going about their business.

These figures are known as staffage.

Staffage is a lazy term used by art historians

to describe the figures that will occupy landscape paintings.

If you've got a portrait with people sitting in the landscape,

that's not staffage.

But if you have a landscape where various invented figures

do things, they are staffage.

It's a challenge when we look at these paintings to say,

either, "They are noble and they're elevating

"and they are creating this kind of heroism of everyday life,

"which is being presented to us here."

Or you say, "This is a dehumanising vision of rural life

"from the perspective of the overseer or the landowner."

And I'm not sure myself quite where Stubbs sits.

Stubbs' rural labourers appear to be contented, clean and well-dressed,

just as the British ruling classes liked to imagine them.

But the dubious honesty of this portrayal

became even more politicised in 1789,

when matters took a dramatic turn in France.

When the French Revolution happens, of course, there's widespread panic

because the British proletariat

might pick up on some of the ideas being articulated across the Channel,

and behave in a similar way.

Stubbs has offered an extraordinary vision of the agricultural scene,

because the corn isn't full of weeds or poppies.

The labourers don't get dirty.

They don't even break sweat.

They've already got everything that the French are revolting for.

These labourers may have had other reasons

to harbour dark thoughts of revolution.

For some, the improvements in farming had come at a high price.

Throughout the 18th century, the Enclosure Acts

had changed the face of the British landscape.

Ancient common lands, where grazing rights were shared, were enclosed

and absolute property rights were enforced by the landowners.

The effect of these draconian changes were felt most keenly

by the rural poor.

A London painter called George Morland began to paint landscapes

that told the stories of this new, dispossessed underclass.

A rather less comfortable vision of society

than that offered by Stubbs's happy labourers.

Ferreting, the subject of this picture from 1792,

was no simple country pastime.

It could get you hung.

Sit down!

'The mechanics of how people go ferreting -

'man, dog, ferret, working in harmony to catch these rabbits -

'is timeless.'

'But there will always be people who have permission

'and people who don't have permission.'

Having this dog to tell me where the rabbits are,

it makes my life a lot more easier.

As I'm putting the nets down, you'll see, she'll go around the warrens

and she will distinctively mark where the occupied warrens are.

And that's the beauty of having a good lurcher as a ferreting dog.

'Back then, the ferret wouldn't be transported in a box like today.

'There'd be little pockets sewn into the jackets.

'They'd keep the ferret in there so they could walk through the town

'and nobody knew what they were up to.'

Hey! Hey!

'People, when they come on to hardships, have survived wars,

'recessions and strikes by eating rabbit.

'If they were quiet

'and had a good dog, they could have filled bucketfuls of rabbits.'

It wasn't just about the rabbits.

Everything on this land belonged to the landowner.

Whether it be the berries,

the mushrooms, it was a larder and it was his larder.

Even the twigs and the firewood, he owned everything.

To him, taking a rabbit is the same as taking the berries and mushrooms,

the same as taking his family silver.

It was his and he didn't want anybody to take it.

A favourite subject for Morland was the country inn.

We can feel sure these scenes are particularly accurate,

as he spent so much of his own time drinking.

Though he earned a fortune from engravings of his work,

he spent it even faster.

Because he was painting to drink, he can be very, very sloppy.

But he can also be quite risky.

For example, this is during the period of the French wars.

He would show rustics drinking in pubs.

This was thought to be a very bad idea,

because if people get together in their own space

they might start communicating ideas.

Morland, being seen as a figure

who takes into account aspects of rural life,

which were meant to be brushed under the carpet.

Poaching and ferreting and the drinking and the disagreement

and the potential for violence in the countryside,

which maybe sometimes we can detect within his work.

The impact of political and social changes in the wider world

was to have a profound effect

on the development of landscape painting at home.

The revolution in France made travel on the continent almost impossible

and bought to an end the conveyor belt of art and ideas from Italy.

The British grand tourist had nowhere to go.

But, artistically at least, things were improving on the home front.

We could now confidently point to our own painters,

like Stubbs and Gainsborough, as supremely accomplished.

By offering training to young painters

at the St Martin's Lane Academy,

Hogarth and Lambert had brought about the establishment in 1768

of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Yet, despite this progress,

in some quarters, attitudes to landscape art were ingrained.

The discourses of the first president of the Academy,

Sir Joshua Reynolds,

rigidly promoted the classical artistic hierarchy

that saw landscape painting as a lesser discipline.

But the popularity of Morland's work

had shown that people didn't pay much mind to that sort of talk.

Britain was all set to enter a golden age of landscape art.

At just this moment, a talented young Londoner completed his studies

at the Royal Academy schools,

only to discover that the origin of everything he had been taught

was important about art was now inaccessible to him.

Joseph Mallord William Turner,

who was to take British landscape painting to its highest eminence,

would have loved to have travelled to Italy,

but instead he had to experience it at second hand.

Having grown up a stone's throw from one aristocrat's

recreation of an Italian scene - the Piazza at Covent Garden -

he soon became inspired by another.

The gardens of Stourhead.

Stourhead was by now the property of Richard Colt Hoare,

the grandson of its creator, Henry Hoare.

This is an image by the young Turner when he was in his early 20s,

and what we see here is not only the beginnings

of Turner's painterly practice

but also the idea that the landscape that was inspired

by the 17th-century painting is then becoming painted again

in the late 18th century.

You can see the temple across the lake and Turner,

in painting this landscape, is very much putting himself

within a tradition of artists that looks back to Claude.

So we go from canvas to the landscape and then back on to canvas.

Richard Colt Hoare had just managed to complete his grand tour

before war with France made European travel impossible.

A keen amateur artist himself,

he gave Turner a drawing he had made of Lake Avernus, near Naples,

and commissioned a painting from him

to depict a classical myth from Virgil.

The young Turner frequently imitated the style of other artists

as a way of improving his own technique,

and he painted this picture as a pastiche

of the work of Richard Wilson.

The lake represents the gateway to the underworld,

a symbolic theme that reappears in the man-made landscape at Stourhead.

You feel here like you are coming underground,

into this sort of watery, cavernous world,

where you're encountering different creatures,

like the sculpture of the river god at the entrance as you come in.

Certainly, this is such a shift away from the earlier 18th century,

where the emphasis is on taming nature.

This is allowing nature to confront us in her wildest form.

This new aesthetic ideal,

which gained favour as we gained artistic confidence,

was that of a picturesque beauty.

And to trace its origins, we need to rewind a little.

In 1761, Richard Wilson painted this view of a crumbling Roman arch

with all his characteristic Italian touches.

But not only was it once again not in Italy,

it was not a ruin.

Until about 50 years ago, this was thought to be a view

of an archway in the Borghese gardens in Rome

until someone pointed out that it was in Kew Gardens, London, TW9.

This arch was the first example of a classical ruin

newly built from scratch to satisfy a fashionable taste for decay.

In 1709, Sir John Vanbrugh

was building Blenheim Palace

and he wrote a letter to the Duchess of Mulberry's client

about this ruined manor house called Woodstock Manor.

And in the letter he says, "Can we preserve the manor?"

And it was the first time ever that anyone had tried

to preserve a building.

And he says, "If we plant trees around it,

"it will look like the most attractive object

"that a landscape painter could invent."

So with that letter,

you get the beginning of a whole movement, the picturesque,

the idea that you can compose a landscape like a framed picture,

but you can walk into that picture.

But also that idea of the imagination and association, which can be about

crashing rocks and waterfalls and all that stuff, but it also can be as

simple as the idea that when you see smoke drifting up from a clearing

in the wood, you conjure up a pretty little cottage and a fireside.

Examples of fine picturesque views

were conveniently available in Britain.

And travelling to the remoter, more rugged parts of the kingdom

to admire them filled the breech left

by the loss of the classical grand tour.

The habit of visiting these landscapes filtered down

the social strata to a wider public and guidebooks began to appear

to direct the new tourists to the most agreeable views.

The location that best exemplified

the picturesque idea was the Wye Valley...

..and Tintern Abbey in particular.

Turner painted Tintern in 1794, but he was a Johnny-come-lately.

Its charms had first been widely proclaimed several years earlier

by William Gilpin in his guide book "Observations on the River Wye

"and Several Parts of South Wales, etc, Relative Chiefly

"to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Summer of the Year 1770".

The beautiful landscape is rather monotonous. The picturesque landscape

is rich and inviting, and you as the viewer

are kind of invited on a journey through these various forms.

So a ruin is picturesque, a completed, shiny new church isn't.

And then was that fetishisation of the crumbling and the decay

and the ivy which is crawling over rubble.

That is what picturesque is about.

The pursuit of ever-more dramatic light effects was another feature

of picturesque landscapes.

In this, Turner excelled.

He was an avid recorder of sunrise and sunset,

always looking for a sense of shock and awe in natural phenomena.

In 1817, he produced this dramatic view of the eruption

of Mount Vesuvius.

He still hadn't been to Italy himself, but so many other artists

had painted the scene that he felt confident he could tackle it.

A volcano erupting was the perfect example of a philosophical idea

that went hand-in-hand with these picturesque landscapes.

The concept of the sublime.

The sublime landscape overwhelms you. There's that possibility of threat,

that indication of danger and excitement.

It is thrilling, it makes you feel very small.

You find increasingly at public exhibitions

and through printed reproductions,

pictures of avalanches,

of...volcanoes,

of floods, of danger.

In the absence of British volcanoes

to provide this magical combination of beauty and danger,

painters discovered a similar visual feast closer to home

in the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.

Coalbrookdale by Night, by Phillip de Loutherbourg,

shows the Bedlam blast furnace smelting the local iron ore

in a picture that could almost be the mouth of hell.

The process continues today, on a more modest scale,

just up the valley from the original site at Blists Hill Victorian Town.

Ironwork in general, the dangerous side of it has always been known

and injuries would have occurred on a regular basis, burns, and you would

have had to be strong physically to get through this sort of trade.

This picture obviously goes back to when iron first started.

This is all quite new and people coming in and seeing the sky change

colour would have been quite excited to have seen what was going on.

It looks a very nice picture and I've actually got one of these

on my house wall at home, you know, in the hallway.

As with agriculture,

industrialisation changed the landscape with alarming speed.

Public admiration for technological progress and prosperity it created

was tempered by a concern for the loss of the rural way of life.

In a remote Suffolk village, the young son of the local miller

was painting the landscape in which he had grown up

showing no hint of this threat.

John Constable, an almost exact contemporary of Turner,

was to achieve an equally elevated status as a landscape painter.

There is a sort of mystery about why on earth John Constable wanted

to be a painter, because there were,

of course, no public galleries at the time when he formed this ambition.

What he says about it is, "These places made me a painter,"

and I suppose we have to believe that,

that it was actually this landscape around East Bergholt

which made him want to be a painter.

The peak of Constable's achievement comes from 1818, 1819,

you get this series of tremendously powerful landscapes.

They were all painted out of perhaps 200 or 300 yards of towpath.

Six stonking, wonderful pictures, of which The Hay-Wain is the best known.

In general, it has changed remarkably little over the last 900 years.

A few details have changed,

Willie Lott's cottage over there has lost an outbuilding,

the water is a little higher, the trees are different.

But basically, it's exactly the same place.

And actually, the remarkable thing about this picture is the...

immense effort that Constable made to make it accurate.

But despite this fetish for accuracy,

Constable was not averse to rearranging things if he needed to.

As a rather mature student, at the age of 23 he attended

the Royal Academy schools and had developed a deep admiration

for Claude and Gainsborough.

By the time he came to paint The Hay-Wain, he was fully immersed

in the Claudian landscape tradition, freely adapting

the countryside he loved to the conventions of the genre.

"The actual Ordnance Survey-type topography, topography that you could

"perhaps depict...

"in an illusory way through photography, has no interest to me.

"If you say, but where is Blakeney Point

"and where is the land at the other side of the Wash,

"I couldn't care less.

"If I need to move something, I move it.

"And I am moving about seas of paint."

When you're talking about, "What is it that makes Constable great?" -

it certainly isn't topography. People say, "Oh, it's just like that."

Of course, it's not like that at all.

There is really no case to argue that

topography has anything to do with the greatness or the quality of it.

In fact, it has a lot to do with the quality because it is usually abysmal

if the pursuit of the painting is something that can be done

by other means, recorded by another means, mechanical means, better.

So topography isn't it.

I think Constable was a revolutionary painter,

trying to make from very, very humble subjects

a sublime art form.

But what we like to look at, because we are a rhetorical nation,

is a more sentimental, and more nostalgic way

of looking at the world.

And why the coach trips go on to this day

is because Constable has a position, almost in the English psyche,

as representing a golden age, a better time.

People don't want to know about the agricultural unrest

and about the turmoil that was going on in England in the late 18th

and into the early 19th century.

Like Stubbs before him, Constable offered us a vision

of rural contentment, an endless summer of reassuring tranquillity.

Whilst he was painting this picture he wrote to his fiancee,

Maria Bicknell, that he was living wholly in the fields

and seeing nothing but harvest men.

Painted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars,

the subject of the picture, the wheat field itself, had been

instrumental in the British victory.

But the country was suffering a period of post-war austerity.

A hungry peasant is a potential revolutionary.

In the early 19th century, Napoleon decides the way

to beat the British - because he can't take them on at sea, his fleets

keep getting thrashed - is to close the markets of Europe entirely.

To announce an economic blockade to refuse to let any British goods

into the ports of Europe and refuse to allow

any of his subject European countries to export anything to Britain.

And that motivates the British elite to close ranks.

Poets, artists, writers, cartoonists, come together and portray Britain

as a vast larder, a bottomless pit of food and happiness with enough

for everybody in the country to share.

Which is very different to the experience of most working people

in 19th century Britain at the time.

Whilst relying on the countryside for inspiration, Constable insulated

himself from the reality of rural unrest by immersing himself

in his art and in his young family.

Constable married Maria in 1816

and they visited Brighton on their honeymoon.

They returned to live there in the 1820s as it was thought

the sea air would be beneficial for the health of his wife.

His affection for the town was clouded by its new popularity

as a resort for fashionable Londoners,

a change that was swamping its original character

and competing with its fishing industry.

Technically, this is an extraordinary piece of work.

For me, as a film-maker, it's very noticeable where the light

is coming from. But the effect...

that he has in here as a painter,

the effect on the clouds,

you know, the light, the light of this piece is very accurate.

His feeling about Brighton,

he loved it, but he had begun to think of it as...

London or Piccadilly-on-Sea.

Because all these buildings on the Marine Parade

had started being built and they were...

He was sad about it.

There is a sense of time changing in it.

These people, they don't seem in the same period as the terraces up here.

Looking down at Marine Parade,

I obviously think of meeting mates on the beach.

I lived in Brighton from the age of two, I guess, until 12.

During the war, a lot of the beach was covered in barbed-wire.

You couldn't go on it. There was a sense of danger.

For young boys, it wasn't scary danger, it was exciting danger.

At the time of this picture, his wife was very ill and Brighton was

thought of as a spa town at one time.

Come and take the waters at Brighton. The sea and the salt.

So this has a sense of sadness about it.

It also probably...

..added to his sense of sadness, the fact that his wife

was very ill and they came for the spa

and I don't think it helped that much.

In 1828,

Maria died of tuberculosis,

leaving Constable with seven children to raise.

But even this tragedy did not lead him to question

his vocation as a landscape painter.

Although he could sell things, he was significantly bloody-minded insofar

as if he got commissions, he saw these as millstones around his neck,

curbing his creativity.

So from the artist as a pragmatic journey man,

Constable becomes our ideal of the sort of suffering soul

who has great outbursts of...

personal creativity which finish up as landscape paintings on a canvas.

In the early years of the 19th century,

Britain suddenly found herself with two powerful but contrasting visions

of her landscape.

The paintings of John Constable and William Turner were the stars

of the Royal Academy shows.

But they were as different in temperament

as they were in artistic technique.

The difference is really a simple one,

of Constable being totally immersed

in England...

..and Turner being completely immersed in the world,

the known world.

In real terms, Constable stayed in England all his life, whereas Turner

toured Europe. And if there had been things such as flight,

Turner would have done the world, without a doubt.

1819 was Turner's year.

He finally made his much-postponed journey to Italy

and the pictures he makes on this trip are the foundation

of his reputation.

Even after nearly 30 years of anticipation,

Italy surpassed his expectations.

Painting mainly in watercolour, he worked like a man possessed.

It was as if Venice had spent a thousand years

preparing for Turner to show up.

He caught perfectly the evanescent light, the heat and shimmer

of a vaporous sun gently reflected on the water

and the almost intangible architecture.

The techniques he perfected here

would reverberate through the rest of his career.

You have a sense in Turner of an expanded world view.

He travelled extensively.

His art ranges in its effects and in its styles a great deal.

You can see Turner sort of poised between an old world

and a modern world in that respect, but being driven at the same time by

the ambitions and the commercial enterprise that were very much

part and parcel of being an artist in the 19th century.

In 1837, his great rival John Constable died.

His picturesque landscapes never really lost their appeal.

The British art buyer never stopped wanting

paintings that stirred emotion,

that invited us, like Alice, to step through the glass into the picture.

But Turner was just getting into his stride.

His late style, an idiosyncratic development of the pictures he made

on that first trip to Italy, is still revolutionary today.

This picture from 1844 was thought to show a view of Venice

until, being prepared for an exhibition in 2003, it became clear

his inspiration was Portsmouth.

A year later he made this picture, Norham Castle, Sunrise.

A lot of the pictures which look most radical,

most like Impressionism or Rothko or 20th century abstraction,

are actually unfinished pictures which were left in his studio.

But the unfinished appearance of these late paintings

may not be that unrepresentative of the way he was heading.

Turner died in 1851, proclaiming that, "The Sun is God."

His death was an emphatic full stop in a chapter that had seen Britain

establish herself at the forefront of landscape painting.

Queen Victoria was now on the throne

and Turner's inventiveness was inspiring a new generation

to take his ideas in unpredictable directions.

If he were looking down from heaven, he was in for a bit of a surprise.

It's interesting to think what the Victorian public might have thought

if confronted by a great late Turner.

Very much about an impression of light in vapour, and then moving

swiftly on and seeing the incredible, mind-boggling detail

and the garish, strident colours of this Holman Hunt

must have been an enormous shock.

Well, now, here we are.

I think we are a little bit below where Hunt was, by the looks of it,

but where Hunt was, Lover's Seat,

seems to have fallen into the sea, pretty well.

I think what's extraordinary about this painting and the Pre-Raphaelite

paintings generally is the spirit of inquiry.

Hunt would have been fascinated by the geology of this place

and the botany, the flora and fauna.

I very much doubt there's much studio time on this painting,

it's all out of doors.

He has stood here and let it seep into him.

Every inch of the sheep, every meticulous bit of its fur

and their faces and even the way the light comes through

the ears and you can see the blood

and cartilage, it's so carefully observed and so directly of nature.

The Pre-Raphaelites were all about 18 years old.

They were very young. They formed the Brotherhood in 1848,

some three or four years before Hunt painted this picture.

1848, of course, was the great year of revolution across Europe.

We are talking about a revolution

not just political, but scientific as well.

People were beginning to realise,

the fossil record was telling the scientists,

that the Earth was actually billions of years old,

not thousands of years old as the Bible had some Victorians believe.

But 1848 was also a very dangerous time, politically,

and that is one of the meanings that's given to this picture,

which, when it was first exhibited, was called Our English Coasts.

This was about the vulnerability of Britain to attack from France.

Napoleon III had just come to power and there was a fear that we might

have the whole Napoleon thing all over again.

Holman Hunt and his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues remain controversial to

this day, and tarnished by an association with the perceived

moral values of the Victorian age.

Looking at this picture, it's hard to understand why today

the word Victorian is still a pejorative and slightly dirty word.

The idea that it's a repressive time is simply wrong.

The idea that it's a culturally stagnant time is absolutely wrong.

It was our visual renaissance,

and the Pre-Raphaelites were at the heart of it.

The hyper-realism of the Pre-Raphaelites

became the house style in Victorian Britain.

In the 1860s, a painter called John Atkinson Grimshaw

began to produce romantic, twilight depictions

of the great Northern industrial cities,

like this scene of his native Leeds.

His knack of capturing a particular melancholy moment at dusk

struck a chord with the sentimental Victorians

and he set up shop in London,

hoping to pull off the same trick in the capital.

In 1881, he painted this view of Heath Street in Hampstead.

I'm from round here, which is the joke, arty village of Hampstead,

and I know this street very well.

Or at least I thought I knew it very well.

What I didn't realise was that one of my favourite potboiler

Victorian artists, Atkinson Grimshaw, had done it. That he'd done,

as it appears, that view, which is a raised bit called the Mount.

It's all done in the usual Grimshaw way of light,

gaslight on water at...

It's not dark, but it's dusk,

and there's a bit of moonlight, all the usual romantic tricks.

And then I look up there and it's not the same, and you realise

that he's reworked it to make it as dramatic as possible.

And when you look down the street, you realise that

that perspective's been changed, too, because it curves too much.

And that's all clever stuff in the composition,

which looks very compelling,

terribly attractive and terribly real.

Now, the thing that drew me to Atkinson Grimshaw in the first place

was the romance of a Northern 19th century city,

and his great market was a certain kind

of Northern 19th century industrialist.

And I'm none of those things, but it got to me, that particular romance,

it got to me even before I'd seen,

you know, a 19th century Northern city.

And then later, I lapped them all up.

He was a magic weaver, and they were, in a way, a sort of potboiler,

a sort of very, very superior potboiler.

But, by God, they work.

Grimshaw had no formal training as a painter, but once he perfected

his trademark combination of moonlight and gaslight

with a hint of autumnal dampness,

he realised it was infinitely adaptable, whatever your subject.

It's what movie-makers call the magic hour,

it's the last hour of daylight

when the sun has set, but it's not completely dark.

It's got a particular magic quality.

And then we have the marvellous sky and the light on the river,

and it is lovely and it is very, very evocative.

People think something's going to happen.

Something did happen to painting at the time.

Impressionism, a style very strongly concerned with the landscape,

was turning the art world upside down across the Channel.

Monet even came to London to show us how to do it.

But it didn't go down very well over here -

we were still in a Pre-Raphaelite mood.

The first signs of a British avant-garde

finally began to emerge in the first years of the 20th century.

The Camden Town Group, named for the area where they met,

depicted a serene and tranquil urban landscape -

celebrating the mundane,

deserting realism for the strident palette of Post-Impressionism.

They were inspired by a vision of a new Britain being built at the time.

'Ebenezer Howard, the pioneer of garden cities, built Letchworth

'with tree-lined roads and a town centre,

'the first complete New Town where people could live as well as work

'in pleasant surroundings.'

The admiration which these new towns evoked is unmistakeable

in this view of Letchworth by Spencer Gore.

This was absolute Utopia. The suburbs were the Brave New World.

People say that the Camden Town Group found delight

in the mundane, but this wasn't mundane, absolutely not.

This was totally and utterly aspirational

in the same way that living in a loft apartment for a city dweller now

might be seen as aspirational.

I mean, when you look at southern middle-class Letchworth,

it looks beautiful,

and it was seen as a wonderfully spacious place to move to.

It's still classed by many as a dream.

I mean, you've got to imagine

that people have been living in a city that's got back-to-back housing,

and then suddenly you can live in housing like that.

Well, who wouldn't want to?

This is still classed by many as a wonderful place to live.

The philanthropist Dame Henrietta Barnett,

who built Hampstead Garden Suburb,

hoped to create a community of helpful neighbours

where, "From every part there shall be good views

"or glimpses of distant country."

I grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb

with a father who was an academic

who specialised in urban planning, and who was involved

in the garden city movement himself and the planning of the green belt,

so I grew up with people who were theoreticians

of garden suburbs in a garden suburb! That will do things to a child!

Dame Henrietta's goal was a socially diverse community

with homes for all income levels.

It would offer working people, "The opportunity of taking a cottage

"with a garden within a tuppenny fare of Central London."

William Ratcliffe, a founder member of the Camden Town Group,

was an enthusiastic resident.

I mean, there were other kind of utopian aspects to this,

if not exactly socialist, at any rate socialistic,

such as there being kind of no pubs -

we've got to remember the importance of the temperance movement at the end

of the 19th century - and no shops, no commercial activity at all.

By the Second World War, if not before,

that dream of a socially-mixed community had completely gone.

You've got to bear in mind, these houses,

even these modest artisans' houses, are now probably a million a pop.

I grew up beyond the North Circular

in the kind of annex of the Hampstead Garden Suburbs

and so to me -

and this is what I find so enjoyable and evocative about this painting

and being here again - to me this area was a kind of

bourgeois Valhalla or kind of Elysian Field,

being slightly plusher than we were.

So I think that's all captured rather well.

It looks like a kind of middle-class city on the hill.

It's infused with a kind of honeyed conception

of what suburban living might be like.

This view is a kind of impossiblist view painted from about 40 feet up

from a tower that was attached to the kind of "clubhouse",

the "suburban clubhouse" - that must have been a fun venue! -

that William Ratcliffe stood on to get this view of, I suppose,

the future of a kind of rationally and beautifully planned urban scape.

And perhaps it's somewhat ironic

that the tower was bombed in the second war and that this view

isn't really possible any more.

Another urban scene that has all but disappeared today was being

painted by a young student at the Salford School of Art in the 1920s.

LS Lowry's pictures of the dark satanic mills of his home town

were a powerfully authentic vision of a vanishing way of life.

Lowry was always seen, in the '60s and '70s, as something rather quaint

and outre and northern.

There are elements of Lowry which are, first of all, social documents.

I was looking at some old films on the cotton towns

made in the '50s and '60s

about the end of the cotton industry in Lancashire,

and they were extraordinarily accurate paintings in feeling -

in feeling, not the topography - that Lowry had conjured up.

He was a very sophisticated artist.

It is not primitive matchstick men in quaint little hovels

that the workers are all living in -

it was a very, very subtle and sophisticated sensibility.

Lowry was a contradictory figure.

His idiosyncratic works sold well throughout his career

but he never gave up his job as a rent collector,

retiring on his 65th birthday.

His effective simplification of the urban landscape

went hand-in-hand with a love of the photo-realism

of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I suppose being a northerner Lowry has always resonated

and this particular one was on me nan's wall.

You know, when I go running along a canal in a town like Burnley

and you see buildings like this that are still unrenovated,

there's this thing of beauty, of opportunity

and almost a sadness where you see an industrial town

that's fallen on more difficult times.

This was a new urban landscape.

Some people looked on this and may think, "Oh, was Lowry painting

"something that was a little bit depressing

"and capturing something that wasn't very human?"

But this is capturing something that's very human indeed.

It's people going to work, earning a living.

They've all got a spring in their step

because it was pretty exciting having a job, number one.

It's a completely celebratory landscape, to me.

Now it can almost look as quaint as seeing the rural idyll

with a horse with its cart and hay next to a water wheel

because that's gone with mechanisation,

this has gone to China.

Another unlikely teenage fan of the Pre-Raphaelites was Paul Nash.

A Londoner from a comfortable middle class family,

the First World War had brought an abrupt end to his studies.

Working as an official war artist, he survived the trenches and emerged

having forged his own unique style and achieved national recognition.

He managed to combine an enthusiasm for modernism

with a love of the countryside

and a dark romantic and mystical notion of Britain's ancient past.

He painted this chalk cross, cut into a Chiltern hillside, in 1931.

The fact that nothing is known about its creation or purpose

was just the sort of thing that appealed to Nash.

Nash would have been fascinated by this attempt

to slightly reorder the natural world.

I mean, what we're looking at here is evidence

of human beings' early attempts at landscape art.

I noticed absolutely immediately that the cliff is slightly curved,

whereas Nash has gone out of his way

to make it as sharp-edged as possible,

which gives an artificiality to his painting

and it's an attempt to distance himself from the empirical reality

by turning up the unease and the edginess within his painting.

Nash's physical frailty bred in him a pre-occupation with mortality.

Convalescing in Oxford after an asthma attack

that nearly killed him,

he painted the view looking across the flat landscape

towards a pair of squat hills surmounted by ancient groves

of trees that had become iconic in his work,

the Wittenham Clumps.

Well, this is the Landscape of the Vernal Equinox

painted using binoculars to see a view

that he wasn't any longer able to get to.

The extraordinary and very effective consequence of that technique

is this flattening of the picture plain

so things that were really quite close to the artist

appear almost on the same plane as the hills that were 15 miles away.

I was fortunate to grow up about ten miles away from here

and I used to come up here on a very regular basis

because it's just a special place.

At the age of about 10 or 12

I started to be aware of the paintings of Paul Nash

and his association with this area.

And, ever more, this landscape with the two hills

and the trees on the tops of the hills

have been very special to me.

He had an extraordinary ability to bring together

and create his own visual language.

He was a modernist, but a mystic.

He could reconcile abstraction and surrealism

and he was the most international of artists

producing the most English of pictures.

Landscape of the Vernal Equinox was bought by the Queen Mother

while the paint was still wet,

prompting her daughter, Princess Margaret, to declare

"Poor Mummy's gone mad.

"Look what she's brought back."

The vernal equinox is that point in the spring when the hours

of daylight and the hours of night-time are exactly equal.

The painting is divided into these two facets, these two basic halves.

On the right-hand side, we have elements representing rationality

and the left-hand side is the mystical side.

It's interesting to talk about this picture in this analytical way

but it's also very dangerous

because what I thoroughly enjoy about this painting is some strange,

mystical realm that it creates which defies easy, rational explanation.

It puts these elements before you

and then it's up to you to make of them what you can.

Paul Nash was of that unlucky generation who were of an age

to serve in both world wars...

..once again being called up in 1939.

This time he was attached to the Air Ministry,

and painted this picture, Battle of Britain, in the dark days of 1941

when positive war news was in short supply

and the achievements of The Few represented,

as Nash said, "our great aerial victory over Germany".

The sky with a battle in it is quite a strange idea.

It really does take me back to cycling up to the Downs

and seeing a dogfight with these aeroplanes.

I might easily have seen this battle,

this moment of air warfare. I could've easily been here.

Maybe I was.

A couple of times, I saw one break away leaving its vapour trail

go spiralling down, "bang" into the sea.

It's over very quickly too, that's the curious thing.

That's something that's quite strange,

the vapour trails stay but the actual battle lasts minutes.

A few minutes.

For Nash, this was more than a realistic portrayal

of the events of the dogfight.

He wanted to highlight the cultural freedoms

for which he felt we were fighting.

The defending Spitfires rise from the warm, earthy foreground

in contrast to the regimental order of the approaching German bombers

who are broken up into the surreal, swirling forms

of the lingering vapour trails.

The power of it, the power is in that section of it,

that section of the sky littered with a battle.

It was real but amazing.

It's terrible to say,

beautiful painting but it's an extraordinary impression.

He's caught the sense of it,

I think he's caught the sense of it marvellously.

Whilst war artists were felt to stir our patriotic sensibilities

in an intangible way,

there was also a more direct appeal for the war effort.

The talents of commercial poster artists and powerful images

of the British landscape were combined to spur us on to victory.

The most enduring of these

was a series painted by a prolific draughtsman from Bradford,

Frank Newbould, Your Britain, Fight For It Now.

In the Second World War,

we see exactly what we see in the Napoleonic period

but rather than Turner and Constable, we have the patriotic posters.

Your Britain, Fight For It Now.

The desperate attempt to use the British landscape

to motivate people, whether they be in shell factories

or fighting in the desert against the Germans

to mobilise themselves to protect this vision of Britain

from foreign aggression.

If you love the South Downs, go and kill Germans.

What always struck me as so strange about the use of that bucolic imagery

in the Second World War propaganda is that most of the soldiers

are teenage kids from urban Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool...

They've never been to the South Downs and yet there's something embedded

apparently in the British character

that responds to those images of landscape.

Newbould's travel posters were strikingly effective at capturing

a scene in simple blocks of bold colour

like this view of Bridlington.

Today the resort is home to David Hockney.

Bigger Trees Near Warter, painted in the surrounding Yorkshire Wolds,

is made of 50 separate canvases, measuring 40 feet across.

The scene in the context of landscape painting history,

it's probably the largest painting ever painted entirely outside.

He used digital photography to keep track all the time

of what he was doing so that he could relate each painting

as he was painting it to the ones on either side.

I'm interested in picture-making technology,

it's really what I'm keen on.

Er...and react to it quickly.

I began drawing on an iPhone and it began as a novelty.

It's a great drawing instrument,

marvellous range of marks if you get into it.

It's something in your pocket, you can always bring it out

and do a little sketch.

There's no mess, you don't need a glass of water,

you don't have to clean up.

The other great new thing in it is the distribution of the image,

that is profoundly new.

I could make a drawing of the sunrise at 6am...

and at 7am, send it out to 20 people.

If I'd just had a pencil and paper by my bedside,

the sunrise wouldn't be that interesting.

One of the magic things about them

is that the drawing as it exists on my iPhone is pretty well precisely

the same on his iPhone so you could say it's the original

or you could say it undermines the whole idea

of an original work of art.

But whatever route technology takes us down in the future,

the fundamental issues of representing our landscape as art

haven't changed much since Richard Wilson painted Holt Bridge.

I've had a go reconstructing Wilson's view

and he really has exaggerated the elements.

The key motifs are there.

But the rocky outcrop is so much smaller in reality

so I've had to scale it up, probably 10, 15-fold.

It's just more grandiose, I think, in his interpretation.

What landscape artists like Richard Wilson and Claude Lorrain