English Landscape
Thomas Creswick
1829
Oil on canvas
In the collection of Birmingham City Art Gallery, UK.
Creswick’s version of the quintessential English landscape as a bucolic scene combining a large tree, a pond in the foreground and some figures. Above all else, it is the greenness that marks it out as an idyll of pre-industrial Albion. Constable’s influence is marked in the palette, although the modelling of the leaves recalls Gainsborough. This was one of Creswick’s earliest landscapes, making use of the conventions of the Pictureque that he was to manipulate in all of his paintings.
Image downloaded, and caption material added, by Simon Cooke. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]