“Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscapes” at the Princeton University Art Museum through Sunday, April 24, provides area viewers to the opportunity to a visual trip through time and place.
Drawn from the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales and taking its name from a line by British poet William Blake, the show illustrates changes in both landscape and the human spirit.
As David Anderson, the Welsh museum’s director, writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalog, “Wales has been seen as a land of outstanding natural beauty since the Romantic period of the late 1700s. Artists came from all over Britain and beyond to paint its mountains and the castles that are the picturesque relics of medieval conquest and oppression. However, parts of Wales were also among the first areas in Britain to be heavily industrialized. Mining, quarrying, and the smelting of iron and copper developed rapidly here starting in the eighteenth century. The astonishing transformation that industrialization had on the land and the lives of its people inspired the painters of the age. Representations of both the unchanging countryside and the fires of the new factories form the basis of this exhibition.”
The following two paintings and catalog notes serve as a quick glimpse into the exhibition that includes works by such notable European artists as John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Oskar Kokoschka, and others.
Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscapes, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton. Through Sunday, April 24, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; and Sundays 1 to 5 p.m. Free. www.princetonartmuseum.org or 609-258-3788.
