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A Picture of Britain : 15 June  –  4 September 2005
 
  A Picture of Britain
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an exhibition celebrating the British landscape - 16 June - 4 September 2005
 
Transcript: The Heart of England - Introduction

Listen to Audio Guide (MP3 format, 1.5MB)

David Dimbleby:
 
There's an interesting idea here in the Heart of England, which is that artists started by having a love affair with industry because they found it dramatic, exciting; it didn't at the start destroy the countryside: it enhanced the countryside for the artist. You see the pictures of furnaces blazing away at night, sparks flying into the sky, all set in a rustic scene, without the painter saying, 'this is obnoxious, this smoke shouldn't be going up here' - it doesn't look like that. It looks like 'here is an added excitement for the eye'. But quite soon, led by William Morris for instance, people started turning their back on it and going to the southern part of the Heart of England, to the Cotswolds, which became absolutely a hotbed of painters and writers and poets and musicians, looking at that landscape; trying to suggest that it was possible that Britain had gone the wrong way, that the industrial revolution destroyed family, destroyed people's lives, changed the relationship between themselves and their work. And they began painting these romantic pictures of the Cotswolds. So in the Heart of England you have these two... stages in a way, is what it seems to me: first of all this exuberance, this excitement about the magic, the fascination with the science and the processes and all that, and then this pulling back, and saying 'no no, this is a false god, it takes us the wrong way; actually we've got to re-examine the old life, the medieval life in the countryside.'