Places of the Mind

About this book

"Places of the Mind focuses on landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern age, challenging the perception that the best British watercolors were produced between 1750 and 1850. Drawing on the British Museum’s impressive collection, this book demonstrates the way in which artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the tradition of renowned landscape artists Constable and Turner but developed and extended the genre, focusing on the changing nature of the British countryside during the Industrial Revolution and two world wars. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, the book includes works by Victorian artists Sir Edward John Poynter and John Singer Sargent, and by many well-known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published."-- "Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850–1950 will display a selection of stunning works from the rich collection of the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings to examine the ways artists interpreted landscape on paper during the Victorian and early Modern period. It is the first exhibition to focus on landscape drawing during this era and challenges the perception that the ‘Great Age of British Watercolours’ ended with the death of Turner in 1851. Over half of the 125 works on display have never been published or exhibited before. They range from highly coloured, detailed Pre-Raphaelite attempts by George Price Boyce and Alfred William Hunt to follow John Ruskin’s precepts to ‘go to nature’, to sweeping wash sketches painted on the spot by James McNeill Whistler and Philip Wilson Steer, to the abstractions from reality of artists like Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore who followed a different aesthetic."--