6 minute read
Force of nature
from GOODWOOD | ISSUE 23
by Uncommonly
A new exhibition at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery celebrates the many British artists – from Turner to Ravilious – whose work has been inspired by the landscape of Sussex. Claire Wrathall admires the view
NATURE FORCE OF
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Left: Chalk Paths by Eric Ravilious, 1935, watercolour on paper. (Bridgeman Images)
Right: Whiteways, Rottingdean by William Nicholson, 1909 (Pallant House Gallery/Barney Hindle). Opposite: Ditchling Beacon, Dewpond by Jem Southam (Image courtesy of the artist and Huxley-Parlour)
John Constable may be thought of as a Suffolk artist, the Stour Valley and Dedham Vale have long been branded Constable Country. “But he was working on a painting of Arundel the night he died,” says the art historian Louise Weller, curator of a new exhibition at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery that investigates the enduring influence Sussex has had on British art. He produced perhaps 150 paintings and studies in the county. “All here sinks into insignificance in comparison with the woods and hills,” he wrote. “And the trees are beyond everything beautiful.”
Constable loved Sussex less for its towns (he judged Brighton “the receptacle of the fashion and offscouring of London”) than for its landscape, as have generations of artists since, praising “the magnificence of the sea […] the breakers – and the sky”. Hence his almost geometric Seascape Study: Brighton Beach looking west, two-thirds of which is comprised of louring clouds captured in such a way that you can almost feel the wind. “There’s this sense of freedom in the work he made there that is very exciting,” says Weller. He would go out and paint what he saw in the open air, laying his paper “in the lid of my [paint] box on my knees as usual”, he wrote.
Constable’s contemporary JMW Turner was also captivated by the county. Thanks to his patron, the Earl of Egremont, who gave him a studio at Petworth House, he made dozens of paintings and drawings of the Sussex Weald. “We’d negotiated with Tate to bring Turner’s painting of the Chichester Canal back to Chichester for its 200th anniversary this year,” says Weller. “And that got us thinking about the range of artists who have worked in Sussex.” Specifically, the Pallant House team focused on how the county’s varied topography has inspired artists as they’ve sought to convey its defining characteristics, from the towering cliffs that seem to typify “an idea of English landscape [as much as] an actual geographic location” to the ancient footpaths that criss-cross the Downs.
The team focused on how the county’s varied topography has inspired artists as they’ve sought to convey its defining characteristics, from towering cliffs to ancient footpaths
She points to Chalk Paths, a rarely seen 1935 watercolour by Eric Ravilious that graphically examines “the design and structure of these paths” as they snake over the hills before disappearing into the distance. More than just a means of getting from place to place, “those are pathways that have been trodden for generations”, she says. “So there’s a sense you’re both walking in the present moment and through time.”
The earliest painter to be represented in the Pallant House exhibition is George Smith (1714-76), a Chichester artist revered during his lifetime (and surely due a revival) for his academic landscapes. These are very much in the tradition of the constructed pastoral scene, “with the tree to the left in the foreground and the light in the distance” – think Claude Lorrain – “but always,” notes Weller, “rooted in a particular place”.
If his painting Cocking Millpond is the oldest work on display, the most recent is a new commission from Tania Kovats (born 1966), who grew up in Brighton and has created an installation: a vitrine displaying an arrangement of glass vessels, each containing water collected from a different chalk stream. “She’s really addressing her personal connections with the landscape of her childhood,” says Weller, explaining how Kovats revisited the streams, tributaries and rivers she knew in her youth as part of a meditation on life as a stream, “from source to mouth. It’s about place and geography and the importance of chalk streams, but it’s also quite a personal reflection.”
Not every artist in the show has an innate connection with the county. There are, for example, two paintings – of Storrington and Rye – by the French impressionist Lucien Pissarro. The majority of the works, however, are by 20thcentury British artists: Vanessa Bell, Frank Brangwyn, Edward Burra, Duncan Grant, David Jones, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and William Nicholson. “It’s almost impossible to look at
Right: Landscape, Sussex by Duncan Grant, 1920, oil on canvas. Bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith (copyright: Tate)
Below: Sussex River, Near Midhurst by Ivon Hitchens, 1965, oil on canvas, Pallant House Gallery (Estate of Ivon Hitchens)
the Downs and not see a painting by him,” says Weller. Part of the appeal of those rolling hills, she suggests, is the way they offer a perspective that gives the impression of having been painted at altitude, drawing the eye down onto the landscape rather than seeing it on the level – certainly true of his paintings Cliffs at Rottingdean and A Downland Scene (With Figures).
Ivon Hitchens is considered one of the great Sussex artists, despite only moving to the county at the age of 47. Staying with friends shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitchens had bought six acres of woodland on the edge of Lavington Common, near Petworth, intending it as an escape from family life in London. But during the Blitz his Hampstead studio was hit by a bomb, so they all decamped to Sussex, dragging an old gypsy caravan onto the plot. Gradually they created a garden, planted with dahlias, poppies and sunflowers. And in time he built a studio, then a house, Greenleaves, where he lived until his death in 1979. “I seek to recreate the truth of nature by making my own song about it in paint,” Hitchens wrote in the year they moved there. For his surroundings – those flowers and trees, that dappled light – were to inspire the splashy double-square “Eye Music” paintings for which the artist is best known.
There is sculpture, too, not least by Andy Goldsworthy, and a new commission from Jo Sweeting, who carves in chalk, as well as landscape photography by the likes of Richard Billingham and Wolfgang Tillmans, woodcuts by William Blake and Ravilious, and a textile work – another chalk-inspired commission – by the Petworth-based tapestry weaver Katharine Swailes.
Not every work in the exhibition is literally evocative of the landscape as nature intended. Take Helen Sear’s Cold Frame, in which a massively enlarged courgette plant becomes something “monstrous and surreal”, calling to mind Eileen Agar and Paul Nash’s studies of found objects amid nature, or Lee Miller’s haunting images of villages around Farleys House, where she and her husband, Roland Penrose, lived for 35 years, visited by Leonora Carrington, Picasso, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miró and Dorothea Tanning.
“It is expansive,” Weller says of the breadth of the exhibition. “But I wanted to explore as full a range of work and methods and styles that have been used to represent Sussex as I could.” Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, November 12 to April 23 2023.pallant.org.uk. A catalogue of the same name by Simon Martin and Louise Weller is published by Yale University Press.
