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

The Mystical West

Spiritual Heaven | In Focus: Thomas Jones

JMW Turner Stone Henge, Wiltshire, engraved by Robert Wallis 1829 View in Tate Collection Engraving on paper, 166 x 234 mm © Tate 2005 Purchased 1986

Spiritual Heaven

Religion - or rather, spirituality - enters this section, in which nature is frequently marked by signs of life from long ago in, for instance, the standing stones of Stonehenge and Avebury. It is not really so much a matter of heaven or hell as of the special flavour that attaches to areas with known associations to the distant past.

If the nostalgia for our own relatively recent childhood can add an unaccountable glow to very ordinary places and events, how much stronger will that be when we are considering sites of great antiquity? Perhaps it is mystery, the feeling that anything is possible, that brings us closest to an idea of heaven in our lives.

James Dickson Innes Arenig, North Wales 1913 View in Tate Collection Oil on wood, support: 857 x 1137 mm © Tate 2005 Presented by Rowland Burdon-Muller 1928

Very often it is through light and dark that artists can indicate to us that a scene has special mystical qualities. Look, for instance, at Robert Wallis's engraving after J.M.W.Turner's Stone Henge, Wiltshire 1829, where the lightning rending the sky above the standing stones has struck dead a shepherd and some of his sheep. Tate curators suggest that Turner created this scene of devastation to draw attention to the religion that led people long ago to erect the stones, a religion which is now dead.

A more joyful mystical quality is attached, principally by his use of colour, to James Dickson Innes's Arenig, North Wales 1913, in which the summits of the magically blue mountain are tipped in pink.