Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape 1850-1914

[From front jacket flap] It is a commonplace among conservationists that the English landscape today would be unrecognisable to our great-grandparents. Ninety per cent of flower-bearing meadowland, we are told, has been obliterated since the year 1900, two thousand miles of hedgerow have been grubbed up, numerous flora and fauna are threatened or have become extinct. And a rural way of life, familiar to us from the novels of Thomas Hardy and others, has also vanished. Yet there remains to us a remarkable recored of this lost world which to a surprising degree has been ignored: the work the English landscape painters and watercolorists between 1850 and 1914. In the pictures of Helen Allingham, Myles Birket Foster, Sir George Clausen, George Vicat Cole and a host of lesser known artists we have an incomparable archive. Christopher Wood takes the different aspects of life in the country - work on the land, the village, the cottage, horses, the squire, and so on - and shows how different artists recorded them. These pictures are not, of course, a straightforward chronicle of rural life. They also tell us a great deal about the attitude of the painters themselves and of their middle-class patrons. Scrupulous though the Victorian artists were in detailing the petals of a flower or the movement of a scythe, few of them depicted the countryside in a completely truthful or comprehensive way.