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Pallant Landscapes : An Appreciation of the Countryside

For centuries, landscape was usually seen as a backdrop in history or religious paintings, but  British Landscapes: A Sense of Place  at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester shows how it evolved as a genre in its own right. And in particular, how artists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were not just reproducing a scene before their eyes but trying to convey in their pictures the emotions and feelings evoked by the land and countryside: the sense of the place, as  Pallant Director Simon Martin, who c urated this exhibition, aptly describes it. The show's not on for much longer, but here's a few of our impressions, and let's start with a painting that's a fine example of how an artist puts current events and concerns on canvas.   It was December 1916 when Mark Gertler painted this view of the South Coast Near Swanage . It looks so peaceful, the sea is smooth, the distant cliffs of the headland appear soft and even the nearby greenery is out of focus. But W...
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Opening in April

If you enjoyed Claude Monet's views of Westminster in Impressionists in London at Tate Britain, your next destination is clear: Monet and Architecture just up the road at the National Gallery from April 9 to July 29. It's a new way of seeing Monet's work, the National says: the first exhibition looking at the great Impressionist's career through the buildings he painted, with more than 75 pictures together for the very first time.
There's another blockbuster of a French-themed show coming at the British Museum: Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece opens on April 26 and can be seen until July 29. Rodin was captivated by the Parthenon sculptures when he saw them in 1881, and 100 years after his death, his work including The Thinker and The Kiss can be seen alongside them in a new light, the museum says.

It's the season to get into the garden. So it's the perfect time to be inspired by the paintings of Cedric Morris, not only a botanist who cultivated 90 new irises but also the teacher of Lucian Freud. Two venues in London celebrate this rather forgotten painter simultaneously in Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Beyond the Garden Wall, showing his landscapes, at Philip Mould in Pall Mall. Both run from April 18 to July 22.
But there's no getting away from Monet. A new show at the Orangerie in Paris looks at the links between his late work and Abstract Expressionism in the US. The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting and the Last Monet starts on April 13 and is on until August 20.

Images

Claude Monet, The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908. (c) Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Gift of A. Augustus Healy
Sir Cedric Morris, May Flowering Irises No. 2, 1935. (c) Philip Mould & Company, Courtesy the Cedric Morris Estate

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