Last Chance to See - Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities
This is your last chance to see Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities at the Laing Art Gallery, which closes on 26 April. This exhibition has been curated in partnership with The Fleming Collection, which is considered to have the finest collection of Scottish art outside public institutions.
The exhibition explores over 200 years of landscape painting in the North of England and Scotland, focusing on the diverse and dramatic landscapes of the regions and how artists have depicted not only the world around us, but also our place within it.
For centuries, the landscapes of the North have fascinated artists, and this exhibition focuses on how these landscapes —urban, rural, land, sea, and sky— have changed. From the Romanticised visions of early artists to the more complex and sometimes harsh realities captured in later works, the paintings reveal not just the physical changes in the land, but also shifts in societal values and human experience.
The exhibition explores the displacement of communities, the migration to urban centres, and the enduring connection between people and their surroundings, including conceptions of place and belonging. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the past, understand the present, and consider the future of these ever-changing landscapes.
With the earliest work dating from the 1560s, the exhibition charts thematic changes in landscape painting. It explores the idea of landscapes as ‘sublime,’ awe-inspiring and overwhelming, and idealised or ‘picturesque,’ which was tied to notions of national identity. Some of the works examine the realities and everyday details of landscapes shaped by agriculture, industry, and urbanisation in later periods, including figures of labourers working in fields, quarries, and mines. A final section looks at how 20th -century and contemporary landscape paintings reflect the interplay of traditional ideas and contemporary concepts as new media and techniques push artists to address the past in innovative ways.
Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities includes works by early pioneers of British landscape art such as John Knox, Alexander Nasmyth, and John Martin through to modern and contemporary works by Anne Redpath, L.S. Lowry, and Joan Eardley.
Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities is on display until 26 April. Tickets are £7/£6 concessions and free for ages 21 and under. Book tickets on the day from the gallery (Monday–Saturday, 10am–4.30pm).
Image: Alexander Nasmyth, A Stormy Highland Scene, c.1810, image courtesy of the Fleming Collection
