Gloucestershire, the largest of the Cotswolds' counties, has strong cultural associations of national importance, including the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose practitioners were drawn to the county's landscape and craft heritage, and the Dymock Poets. Far less well-known is the county's significance in the development of modern British landscape painting.
These creative connections include artists who were born in Gloucestershire, such as Hubert Wellington and Charles Gere; studied there, such as Philip Wilson Steer at the Gloucester School of Art from 1878 to 1881; made the county their inspirational home, such as William Rothenstein; or visited at key moments in their creative and personal lives, such as Harold Gilman, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer.
Many artists working during 1900–1945 were drawn to the rural parishes surrounding Stroud and Painswick, in South Gloucestershire. These parishes offered a distinct 'sense of place', epitomised by ancient farmsteads and tithe barns of golden limestone, deciduous woodlands, winding lanes, old orchards, valley vistas, unfolding fields with evocative names, and gently undulating green hills. Gloucestershire – the south of which was easily accessible to artists travelling from London – retained an image of Arcadia and unspoilt England (particularly during the war years), where traditional crafts, such as drystone walling, were upheld.
Farm at Uley, Gloucestershire
1932
Hubert Lindsay Wellington (1879–1967) 
Stylistically the works created were wide-ranging, encompassing British Symbolism, British Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Vorticism, Neo-Realism, British Surrealism, and a form of Pastoral Realism. This pluralism, which resulted in new techniques, placed Gloucestershire for a brief period at the forefront of British modernism.
There are around 100 paintings, prints, drawings and photographs in UK public collections that depict Gloucestershire and its surroundings which, apart from purchases, entered these collections as gifts from public support: the Contemporary Art Society (CAS); Picture Funds and Friends, such as at Birmingham Art Gallery; and notable collectors, such as Asa Lingard, Wyndham T. Vint and Charles Rutherston (brother of the artists Albert Rutherston and William Rothenstein).
The most recent acquisition related to the subject is Paul Nash's Skylight Landscape, which depicts a view of the Malvern Hills, presented to Pallant House Gallery in 2022 under the HM Government's Cultural Gifts Scheme.
The earliest of the twentieth-century artists to focus on Gloucestershire was the influential British Impressionist Philip Wilson Steer, hailed as John Constable's successor. He created a series of oil paintings and watercolours of the 'Golden Valley' and the Painswick Beacon, in the district of Stroud, during the summers of 1902, 1909 and 1915.
In 1914, Harold Gilman exhibited with Charles Ginner at the Goupil Gallery, and Ginner's manifesto, Neo-Realism, was reprinted in the accompanying catalogue. This heralded a return to the study of nature and the use of more subdued colours: 'All great painters, by direct intercourse with Nature have extracted from her facts which others have not observed before, and interpreted them by methods which are personal and expressive of themselves.'
During his stay with fellow artist Hubert Wellington at the hamlet of Sapperton in the summer of 1916, Gilman created several works exploring the structural nature of trees in predominantly beech woodlands – a distinctive feature of the Gloucestershire landscape.
As Rothenstein also painted the woodlands on his farm estate for works such as The Beech Wood, it seems likely that Wellington and Gilman both painted there. Between 1918 and 1920, John Nash also created a series of watercolours featuring Gloucestershire's beech woodlands, at Sapperton, including Path through the Wood (in the British Museum).
Gilman, who was central to the formation of the Camden Town Group, was also President of the London Group from 1914 to 1918, and Bernard Adeney, who became its President in 1921, exhibited Tunley Bottom, a view of Sapperton, at the Group's second exhibition.
William Bernard Adeney (1878–1966) 
Adeney had been included in the Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery, London in 1915. Vorticism was a short-lived British response to European Cubism and Futurism. Adeney's work is a rare example of Vorticist landscape painting, characterised by the use of multiple perspectives, restricted colour palette, and dynamic angular and curving forms.
In 1909, he married the artist Thérèse Lessore, at Stroud, and lived for a time at nearby Bisley. Albert Rutherston also lived there and created works featuring his home, Nash End, and its surroundings.
Wellington's Summer Day, Frampton Mansell, in which viridian green is offset against glowing pink undertones, shows the influence of both Lucien Pissarro. Summer Day is one of eight known paintings by Wellington from 1915 to 1916 which feature the hamlet Frampton Mansell.
In the neighbouring hamlet of Far Oakridge was the home of influential artist and educator William Rothenstein, who lived at Iles Farm (now Iles Green) from 1912 to 1920; from 1922, he lived between London and Winston Cottage, Far Oakridge. Wellington was part of Rothenstein's circle of artists, writers and collectors; he published a biography on Rothenstein in 1923.
Rothenstein employed the Arts and Crafts architect Norman Jewson to restore and extend Iles Farm, chosen for its views over the 'Golden Valley'. Surviving letters and published texts reveal the strong emotional attachment Rothenstein developed for the county of Gloucestershire, which he described as 'beautiful beyond words'.
His farm, shown in The Storm, its surroundings, and his beloved Wych Elm tree (which he depicted in all seasons), with its immortal soul, as well as adjacent farmsteads, feature in numerous oil paintings and drawings.
In 1917, Rothenstein was one of 18 artists commissioned by the Ministry of Information to create a series of 66 lithographs as First World War propaganda. Rothenstein's six images, collectively known as Work on the Land, provide a valuable insight into early twentieth-century farming methods in Gloucestershire.
Rothenstein supported many artists' careers, including that of Alfred Thornton, Honorary Secretary of the New English Art Club, and President of the Cheltenham Group of Artists; Rothenstein later became the latter's President. Thornton's paintings were associated with British Post-Impressionism. Thornton lived at Poultry Court, Painswick, and was also a notable Gloucestershire collector, owning works by Steer, Walter Sickert and Duncan Grant.
The Cheltenham Group attracted several women members, including Irene Pownoll Williams, who had studied at Corsham Court and taught at Cheltenham School of Art. The style of her painting Saint Kenelm, commemorating a Gloucestershire saint, and its use of tempera paint, reveals the influence of British Symbolism – a style associated with the Birmingham School of Art.
Other Gloucestershire artists associated with British Symbolism were Charles Gere, who lived at Painswick and trained at the Birmingham School of Art, and the Slade-trained Janet Fisher. Fisher was also a member of the International Society of Women Artists, alongside her contemporaries Sylvia Gosse and Ethel Walker. Her Little Shepherdess shows the influence of her trips to Italy and visits to her sister's rural country house at Kemerton, North Gloucestershire.
Like William Rothenstein, Gere supported the Arts and Crafts in Gloucestershire, and his wide circle of artist-friends included Rothenstein, Thornton and Stanley Spencer.
James Bateman also regularly exhibited with the Cheltenham Group, from 1923, and specialised in Pastoral Realism scenes – a type of painting which primarily focused on rural landscapes and associated human activities, rendered in great figurative detail.
From 1914 to 1918, Bateman was part of the Artists' Rifles battalion alongside brothers Paul and John Nash, both of whom created key works inspired by the Gloucestershire landscape. Gilman's technical advice to John Nash, on the use of oil paints, resulted in A Gloucestershire Landscape – a studio painting created from drawings of the Cleeve Hill area, North Gloucestershire, which John had visited with his father, William Harry Nash, a barrister appointed to revise the list of Parliamentary electors in Stroud and Tewkesbury.
Around this time, John Nash wrote to his friend Dora Carrington, 'the farmyards here [Gloucestershire] are so good I think I shall do farmyard scenes for the rest of my life'. In 1917, Paul Nash, as a respite from the war and working on an exhibition, stayed at Winstons Cottage, then the home of the Dymock poet, John Drinkwater. From 1938 onwards, Paul Nash made numerous Gloucestershire visits, staying with his lifelong friend and patron Clare Neilson and her husband Charles, at Madams, Newent and the Rising Sun Inn, Cleeve Hill.
These trips resulted in his series of black-and-white photographs Monster Field, which documented dead elm trees found on Carswall's Farm in Newent. Nash also created drawings and paintings. Nash termed these Gloucestershire works his '"imaginative" pictures – but which might more accurately be labelled "surrealist"'.
Monster Field
1938, black & white negative by Paul Nash (1889–1946) 
Between 1939 and 1941, Stanley Spencer stayed at the White Hart Inn in Leonard Stanley, where he created several landscapes. Less well-known is that his brother, Gilbert Spencer, also visited Gloucestershire, staying at Andoversford, which resulted in paintings such as Cotswold Meadows. It was bought by Tullie House; Rothenstein, as Tullie's honorary art advisor (from 1933 to 1942) recommended its purchase.
One of the Contemporary Art Society's purchases was Louise Pickard's A Gloucestershire Village. She was one of the so-called 'Cheyne Walkers', Slade-trained women artists associated with British Impressionism, who exhibited at the New English Art Club and lived in Chelsea, London.
Rothenstein undoubtedly played a major role in putting Gloucestershire at the centre of modern British painting, but also important were familial connections, art-school training and the county's proximity to both London and Birmingham. Gloucestershire epitomised a timeless sense of Englishness, which found its way into other art forms associated with the county, such as poetry and music. It also offered artists natural landscapes of undulating contours and man-made geometric lines: both key aesthetic factors of British modernism.
Dr Angela Summerfield, artist and art historian
This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation
Dr Angela Summerfield would like to express her heartfelt thanks to all the curators, volunteers and members of the public for their help with this research
Further reading
Andy Friend, John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace, Thames & Hudson, 2020
Peter Hill, Stanley Spencer in Leonard Stanley, Stonehouse History Group, 2014
William Rothenstein, Men & Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, vol. II, Faber & Faber, 1932
Robert Speaight, The Portrait of an Artist in his Time: William Rothenstein, Eye & Spottiswoode, 1962
