Image credit: Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Until recently most people lived in the country. But even though Christ was born in a manger, farms, barns and peasants’ cottages were not much appreciated by painters before the seventeenth century. Then, the focus of Dutch and Flemish painters on scenes of everyday life and picturesque peasantry began to make rural life a more popular subject.
The artistic appeal of the countryside was established in the late eighteenth century by the rules of the ‘picturesque’, which valued rough texture and irregular features over smooth beauty.
As the population became urbanised, this appeal increased and some villages became artists’ colonies. The patriotism of the Second World War helped create the view of an English rural paradise that many aspire to today.
