( MENAFN - The Conversation) As art and cultural historian Simon Schama has explained, the term“landscape” originated from Dutch and German etymology – literally speaking of shaping the land as a cultural activity. It is gratifying to see this term being rehabilitated after decades of substitution for the term“environment”. A notable example of this is the exhibition Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists at the Lady Lever gallery in Liverpool.
This offers a rare opportunity to see works by female artists taken from National Museums Liverpool's archives that depict the landscape in a multitude of ways. The first room,“from amateur to artist”, features the lady amateur perspective. These“leisure artists” were women from well-to-do backgrounds, often aristocratic, thereby having the means to engage with painting as a leisure activity.
A much-loved medium here is watercolour, suitable for sketching excursions. Some of these landscapes depict the pastoral quality of garden designer Capability Brown , who was responsible for a fashion of naturalness that set enduring standards for what would be considered“the English landscape”. This natural look of rolling pastures and clusters of mature trees departed radically from the symmetry and formality of traditional baroque garden design.
Instead of vistas and mazes, box-framed formal flowerbeds, trimmed hedges and conifers, the English landscape garden was carefully manipulated to look natural. At times, this na.
