Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water

Pallant House Gallery in Chichester brings together works by 50 artists to reveal how the Sussex landscape has long served as a source of creative inspiration (12 November–23 April 2023). In the 19th century, the south coast around Brighton was visited by many artists, including Turner and Constable. After Constable’s wife contracted tuberculosis in 1819, the couple regularly returned to the seaside town in the hope that the sea air would improve her health – Seaside Study: Brighton Beach looking West (c. 1824–28), on show in the exhibition, was created on one of their many visits. Further inland, the rolling chalk hills of the South Downs attracted members of the Bloomsbury Group – Vanessa Bell, who settled in the region with her friend and lover Duncan Grant in 1916, captured the landscape in vivid colours in her painting The Pond at Charleston, East Sussex (1920). Also included in the exhibition are contemporary responses to the landscape such as Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph from 2002, End of Land I. Find out more from Pallant House’s website.

Landscape (1913), Edward Wadsworth. Tate Collections

The Pond at Charleston, East Sussex (c. 1916), Vanessa Bell. © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2022

End of Land I (2002), Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London and Hove; © Wolfgang Tillmans