A fresh perspective on British landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern eras. The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact – landscape as ‘places of the mind’, as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it – is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum’s impressive collection, this book explores artists’ spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time. The book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.

The Enlightenment was a period of intense activity devoted to discovery and learning about the natural world, the past and other civilizations. Classification, collecting and deciphering were all important stages on the way to understanding the world. The King's Library was built to house the books donated from the royal libraries of King George II and King George III and they epitomize the interest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in scholarship and study. Aimed at the general reader and relevant to many academic disciplines, this book explores the ways people acquired new information, organized their ideas and reached their conclusions.