This section of the exhibition is devoted to East Anglia - from North
Essex to the Wash, the East Midlands to the North Sea.
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.
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.
All these artists shared a love of Dutch landscape painting and were
profoundly influenced by it.
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.
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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