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Intro | Points Of View | North | South | Highlands | Midlands | East | West | Conclusion

The Home Front  (The South)

Visualising Heaven | In Focus: Eric Ravilious

Samuel Palmer Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep (circa 1831-3) View in Tate Collection Pen and ink on card, 152 x 184 mm © Tate 2005 Purchased 1922

Visualising Heaven

As so often in this exhibition, heaven and hell have no distinctive sites; they are the same place considered from different points of view. Again and again artists have drawn attention to the beauty of the south coast and its inland landscape. They have produced jewel-like images such as Samuel Palmer's pen and ink drawing Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep c.1831-3.

Sometimes artists make treasures out of scenes from the real world purely to record their pleasure in what they have seen and the emotion the landscape has inspired in them, but often beauty is recognised with greater intensity when artists fear it might disappear.

William Holman Hunt Our English Coasts ('Strayed Sheep') 1852 View in Tate Collection Oil on canvas, support: 432 x 584 mm © Tate 2005 Presented by the National Art Collections Fund 1946

In such circumstances the attractiveness of the place becomes poignant; this is what could be destroyed. This is the subtext to William Holman Hunt's Our English Coasts ('Strayed Sheep') 1852.

At the time this picture was painted there were fears of a French invasion under Napoleon III and reports were published in The Times proposing voluntary enlistment to defend the coastline from attack. Hunt's precise technique draws our attention to every detail in nature, making us focus on each individual leaf, the patterned wings of butterflies and the play of light on the sheep's fleece. It is as though we are obliged to notice and value the whole scene before we lose it to the enemy.

In Focus:

• Eric Ravilious