During the 11.11 holiday, there is congestion as usual when going out of the city, and it must be the same when entering other cities. Therefore, it is best to wander around the city during the big holiday, but the major scenic spots are bound to be full of tourists, and it is best for local residents not to go. After seeing the scenery in the west of Beijing for two days, I went to the ancient temple in Jingdong to inspect it again. Since the scenery in the city is not suitable, let's go to see the western scenery. On this day, we went to the art museum that we don't usually go to. In fact, we have a clear purpose. We are going to see an exhibition of British landscape paintings, which is British Western Landscape. The exhibition is called Treasures of Tate Britain.

The exhibits in this art exhibition are all paintings from the collection of the Tate Gallery in the UK, and the theme is British landscape paintings. The earliest works in the exhibition are from Jan Hiberitz, a 17th-century Flemish painter who, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as English landscape painting. This time the exhibit is "Rainbow Landscape in Henley-on-Thames" by Sybriz, a British landscape. Painted in 1690, the only work in the exhibition earlier than 1700.

Hiberitz studied painting in Antwerp, which is the stronghold of the Dutch School of Painting, including Rubens and Van Dyck, who have made great achievements here. Sybriz, though later than those masters in their heyday, was nonetheless influenced by them. His paintings have his own personal style, mostly folk scenes and figures, and usually one or more large village girls or peasant women are working on the picture, and the colors of their clothes are red, yellow and blue. In his later years, Hibrids went to England and painted a lot of British landscapes. His style also returned to Flemish painting, which is different from the Dutch school of painting. open. In the rural scene above, the foreground is darker to draw your eye and attention to the wider vista, where a rainbow rises from the distant hillside after a rain, and the sunlight on the hillside is continuously changing. The town by the river bank is vivid in the setting sun; there are cows and sheep not grazing on the meadow by the river bank; in the shadows, a girl in red is picking milk. This kind of near darkness and far light is the characteristic of Sybriz. He painted many such British landscapes and was learned a lot by later British landscape painters.

Britain is not on the main line of development in the history of Western art. Until the Renaissance, there were no particularly famous painters in Britain. It was not until the 18th century that William Hogarth was widely recognized by the European art circles. He is good at painting oil paintings and prints, the light is relatively flat, the picture is bright, and there are often multiple subjects in one picture. After Hogarth, there was Joshua Reynolds, who founded the Royal Academy of Art in the UK and was the first president. He is a representative of British academic portraiture. Both of their paintings are in the collection of the Tate Museum. Because this exhibition mainly focuses on landscape paintings, we did not see the works of these two pioneers of British art.

After Hogarth, there was another British painter at the same time as Reynolds, Gainsborough, the most important painter in the 18th century and even in British history. Gainsborough is famous for his portraits. He painted many portraits of British high society figures and gained a lot. He used the proceeds to nourish his true passion, which was landscape painting. Gainsborough is the originator of British landscape painting, and the position of British landscape painting in Western painting should be said to be the trend-leading one. This time I saw several representative works of him in the exhibition. Below is a portrait, "Pastor Zaffa Playing the Cello", because Gainsborough's portraits represent the British level, so a portrait of Gainsborough is included in this landscape exhibition.

The period when Gainsborough created this painting was when the Rococo style was popular in continental Europe. Gainsborough borrowed from the Rococo style, with gorgeous and delicate colors and smooth and delicate brushes. The figures in his portraits are often in motion, that is, a certain moment of movement. In addition, he liked to place the figures in the portrait in the landscape, like Da Vinci's "Madonna of the Rocks", and influenced the subsequent Romantic portraits. Below is an English landscape painting in the classic Gainsborough style, "Boys Driving Cows by the Pond".

From the painting above, we can already see some clues of British landscape painting, the light at sunset in the evening, the colors emitted by the air, and the classic backlight effect. However, Gainsborough's main achievement was in portrait painting, and he was an explorer in landscape painting.

In the middle of the 18th century, there was an expert in horse painting in England named George Stubbs. He is very similar to our Xu Beihong. He is good at drawing horses, but he also draws other things. Xu Beihong painted the spirit of horses, mainly based on temperament; Stubbs painted the posture of horses, mainly based on appearance. In order to draw a good picture of the horse's appearance, Stubbs actually did horse anatomy in the countryside for more than a year, and also published a "Horse Anatomy Atlas". One of Stubbs' most famous paintings is a horse standing upright, a racehorse about to jump over a barrier, with its front legs upright. That painting is in the National Gallery, London, and this time it's "Orso and Jockey John Larkin" from the collection of the Tate Collection.

The evening light shone brilliantly on the racehorses and riders, and the sky was filled with white clouds. Most notable is the horse's tail, cut into full bangs.

In the 18th century, there was another painter named James Seymour who liked to paint horses. He was self-taught and he painted classical horses. Check out his Ashdown Park Hunt.


At the same time as Gainsborough, there was another British painter who went further in landscape painting, Richard Wilson. He originally painted portraits, but after a trip to Italy, he changed to landscapes. His style can be seen to be influenced by Italy and Holland, especially the classical composition. He is good at observing nature, and then describing the natural scenery he sees. The following "Avernas Lake and Capri Island" is rare, and it is not introduced in general art books.

It is also the light effect at sunset in the evening, the whole picture is very colorful, the color transition in the sky, without the interference of clouds. The first subject of the painting is the afterglow of the setting sun, and the second subject is the figures on the highlands on the shore under the rays of light. Sun Wukong, leaning on a golden cudgel, is looking down at his victory: the dead bone spirit lying on the ground. Why Bone Essence? You can see that there is a figure of a bone spirit between the shadows of Monkey King and the golden cudgel, but the length of the bone spirit's shadow obviously does not match that lying on the ground, which means that the person lying on the ground must be a fairy. However, the light and shadow on the high ground should be the effect of the setting sun not yet behind the mountain.

In Wilson's later period, there was a handsome boy in England named Thomas Gerding, who only lived to be 26 years old. Although he died young, he was the founder of watercolor painting. It was Gerding who made watercolor painting a formal category, and his watercolor landscape paintings are quite popular. Check out the White House in Chelsea below.

This is the same sunset as Gainsborough and Wilson showed, with the same light effect, clouds appearing on the horizon, and the sky is reflected in the water. This is the style of English landscape painting initiated by Gainsborough and consolidated by Wilson.

Although Gerding died young, he grew up to be a great painter, and his name is definitely well-known, that is, Joseph Mallord William Turner. I have always called him Turner in the past, but this time I saw the Chinese description written as Turner in the exhibition. Turner's position in landscape painting in Britain and even the world cannot be overstated, and he is definitely the standard-bearer. The first painting I saw was when I was in college in 1981 and won an award at the final performance. The prize was a calendar of "World Famous Paintings", which included his "Fisherman at Sea". A scene from The Old Man and the Sea. The author of the painting is (English) Turner. In fact, this painting is now in the Tate Gallery, but it was not seen in the exhibition. First look at this early Turner "Avalanche on Mount Grisons".

The light enters from the cloud crevice in the upper left corner to the lower right corner, and the avalanche rushes from the upper right corner to the lower left corner, so the bright line of the picture is from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. This kind of diagonal light is a typical eighteenth-century French Neoclassical. The snow in the upper left corner is virtual, but it is solid after rolling down the mountain, indicating that the snow on the mountain is in motion. On the lower right is a big broken tree, which means that the avalanche is terrible; does the warm tone of the whole picture mean that the avalanche is very warm? This is Turnerian romanticism. Turner's late period, take a look at this painting "Venice's Via Schiavone: Water Festival".

Turner paid special attention to the changes of light in the air, and in his late period he was obsessed with depicting the propagation of light in various media, including flowing air, smoke from steam locomotives and so on. Although this water festival is an unfinished work, we can see the propagation of light in the water vapor in Turner's eyes. These late works of his have incorporated a lot of light and effects that he himself understood. These works of Turner became the source of inspiration for Impressionism later, so some people call Turner the originator of Impressionism.

At the same time as Turner, there was also a well-known landscape painter, John Constable, who also specialized in landscape. Constable was a student of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. What he studied was to imitate European landscape paintings in the studio. Later, he felt that there was no future for always picking up people's teeth, so he went out to collect scenery and paint nature. His most famous painting is "The Hay Wagon", which is highly similar to Gainsborough's above "Youth Driving a Cow by the Pond". The Hay Wagon is not on display this time because it is not in the Tate but in the National Gallery in London. Take a look at the following two paintings in this exhibition, "Brighton's Chain Dock" and "Dedham's Lock and Mill"

These two paintings are all works after "Hay Wagon", which belong to Constable's mature works and have typical characteristics. Constable is good at depicting the atmosphere. A critic once said that his "Chain Bridge" above "the picture is full of moist air, making people want to hold up an umbrella". The following picture "Sluice and Mill" is also to be completed, but the whole picture can be basically seen, only the details need to be added. Constable's greatest feature is the "sky", which must have all kinds of clouds, which is his first creation. His sky also had a great influence on French Romantic landscape paintings. Delacroix learned how to express the sky from Constable. Constable's landscape paintings are also a source of French Impressionism.

During the development of British landscape painting from classical to romantic, a Frenchman also intervened in it, namely Philippe Louterbeau. He came to England around the age of 31, and formed his painting style in England. His romantic landscape paintings often depict scenes such as violent storms, strong winds and waves, and those catastrophic scenes, such as the "Avalanche in the Alps" below.

The sky must have been dark and cloudy, with only a small slit through which was the noon sun, a very strong top light. Ice and snow rush down the valley, and strange rocks and cliffs stand on the edge of the valley. On a rocky platform, a man is begging God to let him go, and a woman is straddling a horse and swaying the Dragon Baguazhang. From the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the picture is a cool diagonal line, while the rocky platform in the lower left corner is a warm color. The contrasting two sets of lights draw the audience's attention to the earth-shattering avalanche, as well as the collapsed man and mighty woman. This is typical Romantic lighting. Turner's avalanche is a partial depiction, but the scene of this avalanche is much grander, reflecting how insignificant man is in front of nature.

John Martin was also a 19th century British Romantic painter who liked to paint such dramatic scenes. Check out the Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum below.

This is the scene where the ancient city of Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The time is 79 AD. According to the latest archaeological discoveries, this time may change. Everyone on the earth knows about this incident, but no one has seen the scene at that time, and the parties involved have passed away. Martin drew this event based on his imagination. The volcano was erupting, and large liquid rocks were erupting upwards. The hot lava rushed down the hillside and entered the sea without turning back. The sea was churning with waves of 100 degrees Celsius. People who don't think things are too big. Martin also has "The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah", which is also in the same color tone and has a similar layout. It depicts the scene in the Bible that God set fire to the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Among the British Romantic landscape painters in the 19th century, there was an Irishman named Francis Danby, whose paintings were both vivid and imaginative. Danby was a member of the Briston School at that time, and this group of people often went out to sketch together in the evening. The leader of this school of painting is Edward Baird, who has a serious naturalistic tendency. Of course, Danby will be influenced by Baird, and the picture will have bright colors. Check out the image below, "Norway's Liensfjord: Calm."

There was also an American who painted in England in the 19th century, his name was James A. M. Whistler. When he was young, he studied painting in France, and he even served as a student of Ingres. He learned two tricks from Ingres. The first is that lines are more important than colors in paintings; the second is that the most important color is black. Whistler has traveled around with these two tricks, and has been to England and Chile. At that time, Chile was in the war of independence against Spain, and Whistler was still in politics there. After returning to the United States from Chile, he painted a series of "Nocturnes", all in the middle of the night, playing with the black that Ingres taught him on the drawing board. The paintings in this series are all in the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, but I don’t know how the Tate Museum got one of them, which is the following "Nocturne in Black and Gold-Circling Fireworks".


Among the British landscape painters in the 19th century, Thomas Daniel lived in India for seven years. Therefore, in addition to painting British landscapes, he also painted oriental themes. Take a look at the picture below, "The Sher Shah Mausoleum in Sassaram".

Shersha was the "national leader who expelled the Mughal invaders and led the Indian Muslim revival movement" in the history of India in the 16th century, the founder of the Islamic Sur Dynasty in northern India, and a Sunni. Shersha was finally killed in a battle and was buried in his hometown Sasalaam. This mausoleum is in the early style of Mughal architecture, and the building material is red sandstone. This architectural style evolved to the end of the Taj Mahal. Although this painting has an oriental theme, it is a typical 18th-century British landscape painting with Wilsonian tendencies.

At the end of the 19th century, the British Romantic painter John Linnell made a career in landscape painting. He inherited the sky of Constable and followed the Renaissance in northern Europe, especially Dürer. Like Constable, Linnell's landscape paintings reflect nature, focusing on the ordinary English rural scenery, especially the light at sunrise and sunset, which is rich in color and full of poetry. Check out the "Sunset Harvest Return: The Last Train" below.

Gorgeous sunset at dusk. Look at the "Meditation" below.

An entirely different hue, more cloud-rolled than Constable's.

In the 19th century, there was also a painter and sculptor in England who was good at painting animals called Evind Landseer. He liked to paint big horses, bulldogs and stags. His most famous work, however, is the lion that now rests on the plinth of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, in front of London's National Gallery. Anyone who has been to London has basically seen this lion statue, because Trafalgar Square is one of the most famous attractions in London. I once saw with my own eyes some British teenagers queuing up to climb the lion and take pictures while riding on the lion's head. Look, isn't education in the UK also a problem? Check out Landseer's "Stag and Deerhounds (Hunted Buck) in a Flash Flood" below.

In this painting, there is a romantic light source in the upper left corner to the lower right corner, but the face of the stag is illuminated by a beam of unowned light in the upper right corner, which is very strange. Landseer was one of the most important painters in Victorian England, and his paintings of animals are par excellence. Queen Victoria announced him to the palace to paint portraits of the royal dogs, and later painted portraits of the queen herself and her family, of course, each of them often had a dog beside them in the portraits. The dog he loved to paint became known as the Landseer.

The Tate Gallery has a trustee named John Pipo. Pipo is a good hand at making church stained glass windows for people. He also paints landscapes, most of which are the churches he works in and the British national key cultural relics protection units. Take a look The following painting, Seaton Derewall Castle.

This is a national key cultural relic, an ancient castle in the 18th century. In the twilight, the colors were very rich, some of which came from his fantasy of stained glass windows in the old castle, which they called naturalism.
There was also a famous painter named Atkinson Grimshaw in Queen Victoria’s time. He was very experienced in painting city night scenes, most of which were dusk and evening, but the following picture is a city street under the moonlight, called "Night Under the Night" Heath Street".

Note that standing on the right is not a soldier holding a gun, but a general's wife holding an umbrella. She is wearing a British national uniform trench coat, which the British call Rain Coat. Grimshaw's light is precise realism. Compared with other painters, Grimshaw is more focused on the tone of light, and there are few traces of carving. A painter Whistler once said that he "has always advertised as naturalism. I didn't know what naturalism was until I saw Grimshaw's moonlight". Look at the cold moonlight in the mist, the dim street lamps, the wet streets, the dark figures, only a little warm light from the few windows, it is chilling, and the cold color is used to the extreme.

A very important Romantic painter in Britain in the second half of the 19th century was Samuel Palmer. His landscape paintings are dreamlike pastoral. Check out the image below of Mawdage Falls, North Wales.


Palmer lived in Shoreham, Kent for ten years, during which time he painted many idyllic landscapes. On his return to London, his style returned to tradition. The above picture is the work when I just returned to London, the classic romantic lighting from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, soft tones, and two little girls picking mushrooms in the lower part of the picture.

After the above pioneers of British landscape painting, there is a very important genre in the history of British art, that is, the Pre-Raphaelites. They advocated a return to the pre-Raphaelian style of Early Renaissance art, characterized by bright colors and rich detail. John A. Millais, the most talented of the three representatives, also has some landscape paintings, see the following ""The moon has risen, but the night has not yet fallen"", which is named after Byron's "Harrow Eddie's Travels".

Dim light and monotonous colors reveal a touch of sadness, which are the characteristics of Millais's landscape paintings. But his figure paintings are very bright, and the tone of the early Renaissance can be seen even more. The most famous one is the "Blind Girl".

Stanley Spencer in the early 20th century was different from the Pre-Raphaelites. He liked to paint scenes from the Bible, and he used the village of his family in Cookham as the background, as if all the characters in the Bible were Cookham same as people. Therefore, he called his family's village "the village in heaven". In addition to painting these biblical stories, he also sat on the ground outside the neighboring village to paint some landscapes. Take a look at the "Field Pond in Leonard Stanley Village" below.


Spenser's painting style has begun to break away from traditional British landscape painting. When Victor Passmore began, British Impressionism appeared. Take a look at this "Quiet River: Chiswick on the Thames".

where is the river The carriage is definitely not on the river, and the bicycles here are definitely not on the river. The British are not so good at light work. The place where the submarine is parked in the distance is the river. This must be Passmore's impression of the river overflowing. Later, he felt that this impression was not easy to describe, so he took out all the impressions and became the pioneer of British abstract art.

Philip W. Steele is also a British Impressionist painter. He first learned painting from his painter father, and later was admitted to the British Civil Affairs Bureau as a civil servant. I guess he was the little leader responsible for the relief of victims of the shipwreck, and he often went to the beach to beat his chest, so he painted a lot of pictures on the beach incidentally. Check out this painting of Walberswick Beach, at his prime.

Known for his innovative ways of depicting light and shadow, Steele became a leading figure in British Impressionism in the late 19th century.

Impressionism is of course post-impressionism. In this exhibition, there is a piece of "Yellow Landscape" by Post-Impressionist painter Roderick O'Connor.

O'Connor is an Irish painter who painted in France, and was included in the Tate Gallery's British landscape paintings. Probably O'Connor's Ireland is Northern Ireland. When O'Connor paints, he often squeezes tubes of oil paint into strips on the canvas, so the boundaries of colors are very clear. This painting is very much like Van Gogh.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a very important British post-impressionist painter named Augustus John. Check out his painting "Martigue's Little Railway".

John is most famous for his portraits, followed by his post-impressionist oil paintings. In London, his paintings are often compared with Gauguin and Matisse.

Augustus John had a student named James D. Innes who died young. He painted many landscapes and died of an infectious disease at the age of 27. Take a look at the Arennig Hills in North Wales below. John and Innis, master and apprentice, once painted the scenery there for two years on the Arennig Mountain.

Some people say that Innis' paintings are similar to French Fauvism and German Expressionism. His paintings are relatively primitive, and his techniques are very childish. He likes to paint distant scenery.
There was a painter of early British abstract art, Paul Nash. Before he turned to abstract art, he was playing surrealism; in addition to playing art and fine arts, he also played arts and crafts, carving a wooden figurine and so on. Nash's landscape paintings this time include "Landscape in a Dream".

In the painting above, we can still see traces of British landscape painting. There must be warm colors on the ground, the sun must be setting, and there must be clouds in the sky, but all of them have been abstracted.

John Turnard also painted abstract art. In fact, he painted traditional paintings at the beginning. His first solo exhibition was all about landscapes, seascapes and still lifes. Afterwards, he was a little bit different, and when he saw other people painting abstract art, he followed suit. Later, he took refuge in surrealism, and his position was very unstable. Check out his painting "Recycling".

Tullard's paintings mostly depict architecture and creatures. The above is related to architecture, as well as his favorite seascape, which looks like a seaview house made of transparent materials. Are these materials recycled waste? It seems that there is a black mobile phone film, and a gray cylinder head gasket, wearing the remaining black riding boots, and so on.

There is a painter named Peter Lanning in the British abstract school. The Tate Museum once held his retrospective exhibition, and this time there is a piece of "Abandoned Tin Mine".

You can still understand the early abstract art, but you can’t understand the later specially selected paintings. There must be explanations, such as what colors represent what, and then you can tell by how they are arranged or the degree of entanglement between them. what the author wants to express.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, a London school of painting emerged in Britain, the representative figure was Freud, and one of the painters was Frank Auerbach, a friend of Freud. Auerbach was a representationalist who tried to use painting to address the perception of the world. He believed that the earliest universe was chaotic and disordered, and the artist used paintings to record how this disorder became orderly. This is the meaning of the picture below, "The Origin of Ursa Major".

The Ursa Major in the West includes the Big Dipper, which is the most famous constellation in the northern hemisphere. There is nothing in this painting about the description of Ursa Major in Greek mythology, nor about the description of the origin of the universe in astrophysics.

Abstract painting became a trend in the middle of the 20th century, but some of them could not keep up with this trend and were washed away by the big waves. This is the case of the British painter John Minton. In fact, his main works are illustrations, but he also has many landscape paintings. Take a look at the "Street and Railway Bridge" below.

The brightness of the colors looked more like a watercolor than an oil painting.

In order to let the audience see the whole picture of British landscape paintings, this time the Tate Museum also brought some postmodern landscape paintings from its collection. Check out Richard Long's "Two Twelve Mile Straight Walks Over England's Dartmoor" below.

How about it? Very subversive, right? Mr. Lang not only has paintings, but also sculptures, all of which are postmodern. Mr. Lang likes to run amok, and most of his works revolve around the theme of runaway. Mr. Lang has been nominated for the Turner Prize four times, and won the Turner Prize for the fourth time in 1989, which is the highest award in the British fine arts organized by Tate Britain. Don't tell me, the characters in the picture above are really comparable to a laser printer.

The last group of people sat on the ground. It turned out that a teacher was giving art lessons to her pupils. I heard her mention expressionism. Is the latter painting expressionist?


The children said in unison, "This is the famous "Duck Stealing". This is Holland Park Avenue Study by postmodernist painter Mark Boyle. Boyle is known for his "Studies of the Earth", which are called "pictures" rather than paintings, and are mostly a mixture of painting and sculpture. He randomly selects a certain part of the ground, and then uses resin and fiberglass, or even the actual materials on site, to reproduce that ground on the drawing board, and then takes it to an international exhibition. He was one of the members of the Counter-Culture movement in the 1960s, using fluid light displays to perform, echoing the American hippie culture across the ocean.


Generally speaking, this exhibition is not bad. It allows us to see the general changes of British landscape painting in the past three hundred years, but to be honest, there are not many fine works. I think the more representative ones are Gainsborough's priest playing cello, Wilson's Capri Island, Constable's Chain Bridge, Luterbo's Alpine Avalanche, Danby's Norwegian Fjords, Whistle Le's Fireworks, Linnell's Sunset, Grimshaw's Night, Millais' Moonrise, Nash's Dream Landscape, Lanning's Tin Mine. These are almost all representative works of representative figures of British landscape painting in various periods. The most regrettable thing is that there are not a few masterpieces of masters, such as Turner's sea and Stubbs's horse.


After watching the British Western landscape, I walked around the art gallery and saw several famous Chinese paintings. "Father" by Luo Zhongli

"Tajik Bride" by Jin Shangyi

"Water of the Yangtze River" by Cui Bingliang


These paintings were quite a sensation at the beginning of the reform and opening up. It turns out that the original paintings are here! I saw Jin Shangyi's "Young Female Singer" at the Art Collection Exhibition of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Taimiao the year before last.


Every time I go to an art museum, I gain a lot, and this time is no exception.