This section of the exhibition is devoted to East Anglia - from North
Essex to the Wash, the East Midlands to the North Sea.
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It is about the 'flatlands' that inspired a distinctive, realist aesthetic
and produced some of our most important landscape painters - Thomas
Gainsborough, John Constable and the artists of the Norwich
School.
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The section includes Gainsborough's most important early landscape Cornard
Wood, a major loan from the National Gallery, which gave 'roots' and a
mode of expression to the Norwich artists, such as John Crome,
and to Constable, whose art has come to epitomise English rural scenery
- not only for British people but around the world.
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All these artists shared a love of Dutch landscape painting and were
profoundly influenced by it.
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The Norwich artists, led by Crome, painted their own Norfolk, whose open
fields, rivers and coasts fell naturally into the manner of Ruisdael
or Rembrandt.
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Among the more recent works in this section are those by Cedric
Morris, Richard Billingham and Gilbert
and George's The Nature of Our Looking, a composite work featuring
photographs of the artists walking in the fields on the Suffolk/Essex
border.
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