With popular Monmouthshire Art History lecturer Eleanor Bird - learning for enjoyment, looking for pleasure.
The Art of Landscape explores this rich vein of painting through 550 years of change. It begins in the Early Renaissance, when artists from van Eyck to Memling and Fra Angelico to Piero della Francesca abandoned gilded backgrounds and began to create realistic settings for their saints and sinners. During the 16th century, landscape received more and more attention from artists such as Lorenzo Lotto, Titian and Pieter Bruegel, then burst into full flower during the Baroque age when Dutch painters reflected their newfound freedom from Spanish rule by celebrating the national landscape. British art led the way in the 18th century, with Wilson and Gainsborough capturing the spirit of the countryside, laying the ground for those giants of landscape, Constable and Turner. Some of the best known landscape painters such as Monet and Pissarro then emerged in France with the new techniques and everyday scenes of Impressionism. In the 20th century, colour, form and pattern began to dominate as Modernists and Surrealists – from Matisse to Kandinsky to Dali – used landscape as a springboard to explore their radical artistic world.