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The Flatlands
'The Nature of Our Looking'
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This room looks at East Anglia, bounded by the
Fens, North Sea and Wash. Its theme is the contribution of this
predominantly agricultural landscape to the emergence of naturalism.
East Anglia was for centuries isolated and self-contained.
For admirers of the 'Picturesque' or 'Sublime'
it lacked pictorial qualities. Yet through the work of artists
born in the region, it has become the epitome of English rural
scenery.
Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable were natives
of Suffolk. They, like painters of the Norwich School, were
inspired by Dutch landscape paintings in local collections –
a legacy of trading links across the North Sea. They painted
what they knew and saw, close to the land and beneath the huge
skies that Constable called his 'chief organ of sentiment'.
Constable sought a 'natural painture', studying
from nature in what became known as 'Constable Country',
on the Suffolk-Essex border.
Realism also marked the descriptions of rural
life by East Anglian writers like Robert Bloomfield and George
Crabbe, and the Victorian photographs taken in the Norfolk Broads
by PH Emerson. In the early twentieth century William Coldstream
continued Constable's empirical, objective view of nature. Today,
Justin Partyka's ongoing photographic survey The East Anglians
maintains the regional tradition.
The Flatlands - Introduction by David Dimbleby
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