Four-Venue National Tour Begins December 23 at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Selected from the remarkable collections of Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales by Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, and Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at National Museum Wales, Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape offers audiences in the U.S. a rare opportunity to follow, in a single span, the rise of landscape painting in Britain. The exhibition unfolds a story that runs from the Industrial Revolution, through the eras that saw the emergence of Romanticism, Impressionism, and modernism, to the postmodern and postindustrial present. While showcasing masterpieces from the museum’s collection, the exhibition also offers new insights into the development of landscape painting in Wales as well as into British art and culture more broadly.

Loosely chronological, the exhibition is divided into six thematic sections, allowing for surprising and thought-provoking juxtapositions. Major oil paintings are seen alongside works on paper drawn from the museum’s exceptional holdings of drawings, photographs, and watercolors. Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills includes a diverse selection of works by artists who found inspiration in the British landscape, including John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Oskar Kokoschka, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, J. M. W. Turner, and Joseph Wright of Derby.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Barringer and Fairclough addressing such subjects as the Picturesque and the Sublime, eco-criticism, cultural geography, collectors and changing tastes, and the relationship between art and industry. In addition, the catalogue will include entries on each of the works in the exhibition by the curatorial staff of National Museum Wales.

Exhibition itinerary: Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (December 23, 2014–April 5, 2015); Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh (May 7–August 2, 2015); Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (August 27–December 13, 2015); Princeton University Art Museum (January 23–April 24, 2016).

John Constable
A Cottage in a Cornfield, 1817
Oil on canvas
21 5/8 x 19 7/8 in.
National Museum Wales

The Norton Museum of Art,  1451 South Olive Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 33401

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