The Artist and the Country House: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day

This major exhibition shows one of the most important subjects in British landscape painting: the country house in its setting. The publication serves as a catalogue of the exhibition and contains colour illustrations of all the paintings. Every painting has been lent by a private owner or a family trust and many have remained in the same family which commissioned them. The paintings may not, however, have hung in the houses depicted all the time as a popular reason for commissioning such views, before the days of easy travel, was to have a picture of the country seat to hand in your London house. All the paintings reveal details about the different schools of painting, the social history of the time and, of course, architectural style and taste. They also provide information about changing customs and modes of travel, the revolution in garden and landscape design, the changing land uses on estates and a whole range of sporting pastimes.