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Until November 1,
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.
In the depths of World War Two, the British government funded a project called “Recording Britain” that commissioned artists to capture landscapes and buildings at risk of disappearing.
Even before that, Graham Sutherland’s 1929 etching “Hangar Hill” served to preserve the threatened, at least on paper. It depicts the then rural area in the Borough of Ealing that was about to be taken over by mock Tudor housing for Londoners relocating from the city centre.
As an evocation of what it feels like to be somewhere and of landscape’s emotional rather than literal truth, it is part of a collection of atmospheric, black and white prints at the heart of the exhibition “A Sense of Place”, which is perfectly timed to help us process our own anxieties about what climate change is doing to the land around us. It explores the pain inherent in art of knowing that whatever we love is vulnerable and transient.
Sutherland’s vision of Hangar Hill was darkened by personal loss – his infant son had just died – as well as the prevailing social concerns of modernisation, economic depression and menacing change.
In keeping with the Pallant’s vocation to enlarge, display and contextualise its nationally important collection, Sutherland appears alongside other artists of his time who embraced the resurgence in woodcuts and etchings in the two decades after the first World War.
They resurged as a reaction to the pre-war aesthetic fascination with mechanisation and modernity, given expression in the manifesto of the avant-garde Vorticist moment signed in1914, just before the horrific machinery of the frontline transformed perspectives.
Sutherland’s dedication to etching was spurred after a fellow student at Goldsmith’s College, London, William Larkins purchased a 19th-century Samuel Palmer etching in a shop in Charing Cross Road that inspired him and his fellow students. While visitors to the Pallant don’t get to see his purchase – “The Herdsman’s Cottage” – they are treated to “The Rising Moon”, part of the Pallant’s collection.
In the dim light of this part of the gallery, to protect the rarely displayed prints, we peer into the poignant, absorbing beauty of Palmer’s intricately drawn, moon-lit pastoral scene.
We also discover the gallery’s impressive array of acquisitions made last year and this, including “September” (1928) by Sutherland’s fellow student Paul Drury, which harks back to the times when the seasons were not disrupted, and Paul Nash’s 1918 lithograph “Void” that evokes the total destruction of war.
Another 2025 acquisition is a work of Edward Alexander Wadsworth, who was among the signatories of the Vorticist manifesto. His 1919 lithograph “Ladle Slag, Old Hill” applies modernist lines to the Black Country’s industrial landscape – and, as with Nash’s “Void”, the impression is of an area laid waste, not energised.
Moving on from exhibition’s darkened room of prints, Nash’s “Wittenham Clumps” (1935) and a new Nash acquisition, his seascape “Peveril” (1934), align with the softer English, landscape tradition of flowing lines and gentle palettes.
The approach served for his commission from oil company Shell for a series of lithographs with the slogan “You Can Be Sure of Shell”. Images such as Nash’s “Kimmeridge Folly” (1937), inspired by the time he spent in Dorset, were designed to encourage drivers to use petrol to enjoy Britain’s landscape. The ironies are multiple.
Nash is a stand-out in the Pallant collection and in this exhibition, but in all more than 60 artists are represented in “A Sense of Place,” as the curators are mindful of their vocation to contextualise and the need to have a broad appeal.
The new acquisitions slightly redress the balance towards women artists with “Barn and Road”, painted in oil in1912 by the under-appreciated Helen Saunders, one of only two women to join the Vorticists. “Barn and Road” predates that with a depiction of rural life. It’s modern rather than straightforwardly naturalistic but implies a stasis at odds with the energy of Vorticism.
Barns, as a link between human activity and nature, are recurrent in landscape painting.
Ivon Hitchens’ “Curved Barn” (1922) is one of the Pallant’s earliest acquisitions – donated by the artist just before his death in 1979, three years before the Pallant opened.
His barn is more fabulous than real, but still figurative compared with Hitchens’ later landscapes.
“Sussex River near Midhurst” (1965) dazzles us with blocks of colour based on the artist immersing himself in nature.
It’s a far cry from the 18th-century artists, who, as we’re reminded at the start of the exhibition, were the first to make landscape the core subject rather than merely the backdrop. This rich, thoughtful exhibition makes us wonder why it wasn’t always the case.
British Landscapes: A Sense of Place,
Until November 1,
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.
In the depths of World War Two, the British government funded a project called “Recording Britain” that commissioned artists to capture landscapes and buildings at risk of disappearing.
Even before that, Graham Sutherland’s 1929 etching “Hangar Hill” served to preserve the threatened, at least on paper. It depicts the then rural area in the Borough of Ealing that was about to be taken over by mock Tudor housing for Londoners relocating from the city centre.
As an evocation of what it feels like to be somewhere and of landscape’s emotional rather than literal truth, it is part of a collection of atmospheric, black and white prints at the heart of the exhibition “A Sense of Place”, which is perfectly timed to help us process our own anxieties about what climate change is doing to the land around us. It explores the pain inherent in art of knowing that whatever we love is vulnerable and transient.
Sutherland’s vision of Hangar Hill was darkened by personal loss – his infant son had just died – as well as the prevailing social concerns of modernisation, economic depression and menacing change.
In keeping with the Pallant’s vocation to enlarge, display and contextualise its nationally important collection, Sutherland appears alongside other artists of his time who embraced the resurgence in woodcuts and etchings in the two decades after the first World War.
They resurged as a reaction to the pre-war aesthetic fascination with mechanisation and modernity, given expression in the manifesto of the avant-garde Vorticist moment signed in1914, just before the horrific machinery of the frontline transformed perspectives.
Sutherland’s dedication to etching was spurred after a fellow student at Goldsmith’s College, London, William Larkins purchased a 19th-century Samuel Palmer etching in a shop in Charing Cross Road that inspired him and his fellow students. While visitors to the Pallant don’t get to see his purchase – “The Herdsman’s Cottage” – they are treated to “The Rising Moon”, part of the Pallant’s collection.
In the dim light of this part of the gallery, to protect the rarely displayed prints, we peer into the poignant, absorbing beauty of Palmer’s intricately drawn, moon-lit pastoral scene.
We also discover the gallery’s impressive array of acquisitions made last year and this, including “September” (1928) by Sutherland’s fellow student Paul Drury, which harks back to the times when the seasons were not disrupted, and Paul Nash’s 1918 lithograph “Void” that evokes the total destruction of war.
Another 2025 acquisition is a work of Edward Alexander Wadsworth, who was among the signatories of the Vorticist manifesto. His 1919 lithograph “Ladle Slag, Old Hill” applies modernist lines to the Black Country’s industrial landscape – and, as with Nash’s “Void”, the impression is of an area laid waste, not energised.
Moving on from exhibition’s darkened room of prints, Nash’s “Wittenham Clumps” (1935) and a new Nash acquisition, his seascape “Peveril” (1934), align with the softer English, landscape tradition of flowing lines and gentle palettes.
The approach served for his commission from oil company Shell for a series of lithographs with the slogan “You Can Be Sure of Shell”. Images such as Nash’s “Kimmeridge Folly” (1937), inspired by the time he spent in Dorset, were designed to encourage drivers to use petrol to enjoy Britain’s landscape. The ironies are multiple.
Nash is a stand-out in the Pallant collection and in this exhibition, but in all more than 60 artists are represented in “A Sense of Place,” as the curators are mindful of their vocation to contextualise and the need to have a broad appeal.
The new acquisitions slightly redress the balance towards women artists with “Barn and Road”, painted in oil in1912 by the under-appreciated Helen Saunders, one of only two women to join the Vorticists. “Barn and Road” predates that with a depiction of rural life. It’s modern rather than straightforwardly naturalistic but implies a stasis at odds with the energy of Vorticism.
Barns, as a link between human activity and nature, are recurrent in landscape painting.
Ivon Hitchens’ “Curved Barn” (1922) is one of the Pallant’s earliest acquisitions – donated by the artist just before his death in 1979, three years before the Pallant opened.
His barn is more fabulous than real, but still figurative compared with Hitchens’ later landscapes.
“Sussex River near Midhurst” (1965) dazzles us with blocks of colour based on the artist immersing himself in nature.
It’s a far cry from the 18th-century artists, who, as we’re reminded at the start of the exhibition, were the first to make landscape the core subject rather than merely the backdrop. This rich, thoughtful exhibition makes us wonder why it wasn’t always the case.
Barbara Lewis © 2026.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, drawing, exhibitions, painting • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, drawing, exhibitions, painting