Professor Christiana Payne

For as long as we have walked the earth, it has provided an endless source of inspiration for artists striving to capture nature’s majesty. The British landscape tradition runs so deep it has come to represent our national consciousness at its most idealistic, ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. Earth explores how attitudes towards the landscape have evolved over the centuries; from the pastoral idylls of the eighteenth century, through representations of the Romantic Sublime, to present-day confrontations of the climate emergency and appreciation for the natural world that has grown in the wake of the global pandemic.

Alongside illustrations from over fifty historic and contemporary artists are essays exploring; our dependence on the ‘bountiful earth’ as the ultimate provider through the works of Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer, by Christiana Payne; landscape as a spiritual, ritual and emotional space, from the perspective of Emma Stibbon, spanning works by artists such as Richard Long and Anya Gallaccio to JMW Turner and Eric Ravilious; and the long tradition of artists’ use of earth as material, from a simple tool to ecological symbolism, by Nathalie Levi.

Earth surveys the representation of our environment across four centuries, inviting us to consider our planet in all its abundance, precarity and preciousness. -- Provided by publisher.

Oxford has a special place in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism. Thomas Combe (superintendent of the Clarendon Press) encouraged John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt at a crucial early stage of their careers, and his collection became the nucleus of the Ashmolean collection of works by the Brotherhood and their associates. Two young undergraduates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, saw the Combe collection and became enthusiastic converts to the movement. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1857 they undertook the decoration of the debating chamber (now the Old Library) of the Oxford Union. The group’s champion John Ruskin also studied in Oxford, where he oversaw the design of the University Museum of Natural History and established the Ruskin School of Drawing. Jane Burden, future wife of Morris and muse (probably also lover) of Rossetti, was a local girl, first spotted at the theatre in Oxford.   

Oxford’s key role in the movement has made it a magnet for important bequests and acquisitions, most recently of Burne-Jones’s illustrated letters and paintbrushes. The collection of watercolours and drawings includes a wide variety of appealing works, from Hunt’s first drawing on the back of a tiny envelope for The Light of the World (Keble College), to large, elaborate chalk drawings of Jane Morris by Rossetti. It is especially rich in portraits, which throw an intimate light on the friendships and love affairs of the artists, and in landscapes which reflect Ruskin’s advice to ‘go to nature’.

More than just an exhibition catalogue, this book is a showcase of the Ashmolean's incredible collection, and demonstrates the enormous range of Pre-Raphaelite drawing techniques and media, including pencil, pen and ink, chalk, watercolour, bodycolour and metallic paints. It will include designs for stained glass and furniture, as well as preparatory drawings for some of the well-known paintings in the collection.

Fire! traces the representation of fire in British art across the last four centuries.  In turns destructive and creative, fearsome and fascinating, it’s a subject loaded with symbolism, ritual and emotion. Unsurprisingly, the subject of fire has drawn in artists throughout the ages.  It features in the work of major British artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, J.M. Whistler, Joseph Wright of Derby  and William Blake, who are presented here alongside contemporary work by artists such as Cornelia Parker, David Nash, Mark Wallinger and Douglas Gordon.

The book looks at the many facets of fire; its ability to express concepts on a human scale, such as warmth, anger and passion; as a storyteller fundamental to religion and mythology; its effects on our language – we talk of burning desires and blazing rows; as a driving force behind the progress of civilisation through science, industry and technology; as a political tool sending visceral message with shocking finality; its contribution to advances in cooking, pottery, metal and glass; as a signifier of absence, the soul, loss and transcendence. Three newly commissioned essays on the subject  explore fire in the process of making and how artists’ approaches to fire have changed over time, recording historical, religious, domestic or natural events as well as exploring fire as a material phenomenon informed by contemporary themes and issues, combining art and science. This book seeks to address the dual nature of fire showing that fire continues to be welcomed and feared in equal measure.

Accompanies the exhibition held at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 15 June-1 September 2019.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sketchbooks, journals, and writings, this essential guide to John Brett (1831-1902) investigates the painter who was seen as the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school. In addition to exploring the familiar early works, including The Val d'Aosta and Stonebreaker, it provides rich information on his later, less-known coastal and marine paintings. Brett's turbulent friendship with John Ruskin is discussed, as are his relations with his beloved sister, Rosa, and his partner Mary, with whom he had seven children. His fervent interest in astronomy, his love of the sea, and his lifelong pursuit of wealth and recognition are all examined in this reassessment, which concludes with a catalogue raisonne of his works, prepared by his descendent Charles Brett.

The book weaves its way through British art including early experiments with air and studies of clouds, to representations of breath (blowing glass, balloons) and wind instruments to flying creatures (real and imaginary) and wartime skies, before considering the physical possibilities of flight which shifted our perceptions of the landscape, as aerial photography made the view of the earth from above available to wider audiences. Contemporary work introduces new environmental issues to the narrative, making reference to climate change and air-borne disease, as well as considering air as an integral component in the process of making art, to demonstrate how air is everywhere.The beautifully illustrated book includes a number of insightful essays which expand on the exhibition’s interweaving themes looking at the life of breath from a philosophical position; an exploration of our enduring fascination with the pursuit of ‘ballooning’ from the first intrepid flights in the eighteenth century from co-curator Christiana Payne, and a nebulous account of clouds throughout British art from Gemma Brace, attempting to visualise the invisible in words.

All these paintings focus on beaches, that is, flattish areas of sand or pebbles adjacent to the sea. In the nineteenth century the word ‘beach’ began to take on its modern connotation as a site for holiday-making and leisure. In tourist resorts such as Ramsgate and Pegwell Bay in Kent, the beach was a social space where people prepared to bathe, read novels and newspapers, flirted, rode donkeys, watched entertainers, collected natural history specimens or simply sat out in the open air. In fishing villages, however, the flat beach had a more utilitarian function as the place where boats were pulled up onto the sand, where their catch was unloaded and sometimes where the fish were sold to merchants and the general public. In these locations, such as Cullercoats on the north-east coast near Newcastle, the beach was a different kind of social space, one in which the relationships within a close-knit community were cemented and tested. Here, and on unfrequented rocky beaches in more remote locations such as Cornwall, images of the beach might remind viewers not of holidays but of the symbolism of the seacoast as a metaphor for the fragility of human life and the hope of immortality.