Exhibition

No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection

29 Oct 2014 – 29 Apr 2015

Event times

Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5.30pm

Cost of entry

Free

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Fleming Collection

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • By bus: 8, 9, 14, 19, 22, 38
  • Nearest tube: Green Park
  • 15 minute walk from Victoria
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An exhibition of landscapes from 1880 to the present day highlighting the influence of international travel on Scottish landscape artists

About

From the emergence of landscape as a subject in its own right for artists in the seventeenth century, through a period of dramatic growth in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and modern advancements of the twentieth century, central to its development in Scotland has been international travel and the absorption of foreign influences. Selected from the Fleming Collection, a collection of paintings established in 1968 by Flemings, the former merchant bank, this display considers landscape works from 1880 to the present day that represent ‘foreign land’ alongside Scottish landscapes. An unusual double-sided painting by William Crozier (1897–1930) with one side a scene from a balcony in Tuscany, and the other a view towards Edinburgh Castle from Castle Street, neatly encapsulates this dialogue.


Towards the end of the nineteenth century landscape painting underwent great change as painters began to work out of doors, drawing on their immediate surroundings through direct experience. Artists associated with the Glasgow School, among the earliest works on display, continued to build upon a long-standing tradition of international travel. By the early twentieth century, studying in Paris had become commonplace for Scottish artists and France assumed the importance that Holland and Italy had held in preceding centuries. The intensity of foreign experience is seen, for example, in Melville’s use of brilliant colours and in the work of the Scottish Colourists who continued the practice of working en plein air.


Landscape has found multifaceted expression over a long span of cultural history in the West and continues to do so in the work of contemporary artists, who explore the subject through a plurality of styles and diversity of place. The subject of landscape itself is a complex one, at once social, political, geographical and cultural; a highly selective, and often idealising, process of turning land into landscape, and landscape into art. These landscapes from outside the Scottish setting reveal a more complex ‘picture’ of the artistic and geographic context of Scottish landscape, and this internationalism has helped shape, rather than compromise, its character. 

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