12 artworks that capture the beauty of the British countryside

Being almost entirely housebound will have left you hankering – no, giddy – for the prospect of a change of scenery. For much of lockdown I resisted even thinking about vaults of glassy sky, or milk-dense mist in a damp field, or the salty, bright new world suggested by an empty beach, in case the sheer longing for them unhinged me.

It’s all still there of course, no doubt lovelier than ever thanks to the dearth of day trippers, and now that those day trips – if not the overnight stays – are back on the menu, what better way to re-immerse yourself in “Before” than a slosh around the countryside?

In case avoiding thoughts of all things green and pleasant has left you a touch rabbit-in-headlights concerning where to go, here is some artistic inspiration to ease the load.

John Nash: Dorset Landscape, 1930

Many would argue for his brother Paul, but for me, the unjustly neglected John, who was younger by some years and had no formal training as an artist, is the better landscape painter.

A self-described “artist-plantsman”, who delighted in horticulture, Nash junior roamed the country in search of what his close friend, the author Ronald Blythe, who nursed Nash for several years before he died, termed “good bits” – “some twist and turn in the land, some drawing together of elm and oak”.

The painting under consideration here is of Dorset, and captures beautifully that landscape’s soft undulating rhythms. A shadowy foreground rears forward toward the dense clump of windblown trees. Beyond, a steep, tilled hill rises toward the sky.

Jan Siberechts: View of Nottingham from the East, 1695

The Flemish painter Jan Siberechts came to Britain in 1672, at the invitation of the Duke of Buckingham, who wanted his help decorating Cliveden House. Siberechts soon became known as the country house portraitist par excellence among the aristocratic class, producing bird’s-eye views that brim with snippets of agricultural life and the quicksilver effects of light and shadow.

Siberechts made paintings all over Britain, but most beautiful are those of the landscape around Henley-on-Thames (then a trading centre), such as the view from the Wargrave Road. I’m also fond of his View of Nottingham from the East (1695), featuring the first house in Nottingham to have sash windows (or so the story goes).

John Davies: Agecroft Power Station, Salford, 1983

Davies is best known today for his large format, black-and-white photographs of Britain’s sprawling industrial landscape – hills and fields veined by weather-bitten viaducts and smoke-belching towns. The visual equivalent of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, perhaps, and just as rapturous.

Agecroft Power Station, Salford (1983) is his signature shot (I have a postcard of it on my fridge), but equally bewitching are the rugged rural views in the Lake District, Ireland and Scotland that Davies was photographing in the Seventies. I particularly like the one of County Sligo, in which a glowering sky unfolds to reveal the remains of a spring day.

Harry Epworth Allen: Summer, 1940

This radiant painting depicts the end of a hot summer’s day, as the blue-mauve light of early evening steals across the land. It is a song to plenty: the hedgerows are thick; the trees are in full leaf and, in the foreground, hay is being collected.

The setting is unrecorded, though it is probably Derbyshire, where Allen was born and grew up and to which he returned after the First World War, having gained the Military Medal for conspicuous gallantry and lost a leg. He painted many views of the region.

Pre-war, Allen’s style was much more realistic, but by the Thirties he had perfected this sculptural, almost surrealist technique, and was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Hard to choose between this painting and his one of dry stone walls undulating through the Derbyshire hills, but I think the light just pips it.

Laura Knight: Lamorna Cove, 1917

This impressionistic painting of sunlight on sea depicts a socket of the Cornish coastline near Penzance, looking out towards the headland of Carn Du. In the 19th century, granite from the area was taken from this cove to Tilbury, and used in the construction of the Thames Embankment.

Knight, who was the first woman to be elected Royal Academician, created the painting from a watercolour sketch that she made on the spot while sitting, as was her wont, in the back of her antique Rolls-Royce with the door wide open. She recalled that “the little bay” had been “turned to gold by the reflection of the sun shining on the cliff above”.

George Fennel Robson: Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, North Wales, 1832

Robson is best known for his watercolour views of the Scottish Highlands, which the critic John Ruskin described as “serious and quiet in the highest degree… certain qualities of atmosphere and texture in them have never been excelled”.

His drawing of the wild, foliage-covered hills around Mount Snowdon was made a year before his death. He captured it – as with all his views – during long summer excursions in which he dressed as a shepherd and roamed the countryside, returning to London for the winter where he scratched a living selling his pictures from a gilder’s shop in Holborn.

John Constable: Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816

Constable’s consuming devotion to the landscape of Suffolk (and nearby Essex, where this picture was painted – a commission from his friend Major General Francis Slater-Rebow) is present in all his best works.

That said, his feathery detail and red-flecked, drooping trees can sometimes feel cloying. Here, he does away with all that, and the result has an exhilarating air. Under swaggering clouds, the sweeping lowlands convey beautifully the capriciousness of a British summer: brilliantly sunny one moment, cool and shady the next.

Harry Cory Wright: Arc, 2017

Harry Cory Wright could be Britain’s finest landscape photographer. His images have a luminous, burnished feel that shivers easily between the now and everlasting. To make them, he uses a traditional wood and brass plate camera, which captures the vivid colours and dramatic light of the natural world in minute detail.

Most recently, he has become especially absorbed by the landscape near to his home in Norfolk – a world of ridge and furrow and skies mirrored in full ditches.

Arc, an other-worldly image, is from his series “Six Hour Place” (2017), which explores the flat, tidal salt marshes between Brancaster and Burnham Overy. “The tide comes in twice a day and changes everything,” he explains. “It is beautiful, yet can be beastly.”

Clare Leighton: The Farmer’s Year (1933)

In the early 1930s, concerned by the way in which the Great Depression was destroying the bucolic life of the countryside, the artist Clare Leighton began work on a sequence of 12 wood engravings that would preserve the traditional farmer’s way of life for future generations.

Her book – The Farmer’s Year – is an exquisite record of cider presses, threshing, lopping and the like but just as attentive text, which catches small surprises everywhere: “Gold falls in splashes on the branches of the elm,” she writes. “Here in this soft land of shelter...round and sudden as a child’s imaginings, rise the little wooded hills.”

Hannah Woodman

With titles such as Blowy Spring Day, Penwith, and High Hedges, Cornish Winter, it is perhaps easy to see why Woodman’s expressive paintings are snapped up by collectors as fast as she can make them.

The images are little like those we usually see of this corner of England: all ragged grass, flooded plough furrows and turbulent weather. “It’s the drama and expanse of the place,” she explains. “When you stand and watch a weather front approaching over the seas, and see how the light changes the colours and mood so rapidly, it is a thrilling engagement with your surroundings.”

Samuel Palmer: The Weald of Kent, c 1833-4

Samuel Palmer’s early paintings have a wonderful hallucinatory, slumbery quality (later in life he went a bit schmaltzy). He once said that he felt as if he had been blessed with the powers of spiritual vision, which perhaps explains it.

The Weald of Kent, in which a repoussoir of trees gives the landscape beyond the feel of a faerie kingdom spied through a tunnel, was painted near Shoreham in Kent where Palmer and his friends formed “The Ancients”, a group united in their intent to leave the urban world behind (they lasted eight years, which is pretty impressive).

William Nicholson: The Hill above Harlech (c 1917)

Within his lifetime, Nicholson was best known for his portraits. Since then, it’s been his still lifes, but he also produced a steady stream of landscapes. Many were of the countryside near his home on the Sussex coast, but his best, I think, is this view from high above Harlech Castle in North Wales, looking across Tremadoc Bay. The green-grey foreground – a brew of slate, shadows and winding dry-stone walls – seems to whirl towards the moonlit sea that is the picture’s middle.