From ancient chalk figures to windswept coastlines, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place brings together more than 60 artists exploring the many ways Britain’s landscapes have been experienced and represented. 

With so much to see, we’ve picked out five artworks to look out for on your next visit to Pallant House Gallery.

Eric Ravilious’s Cerne Abbas Giant (1939) depicts the famous chalk figure in Dorset during the early months of the Second World War. Usually stark white against the hillside, the Giant has been partially covered with earth, while barbed wire cuts across the foreground. 

Ravilious was appointed an official war artist in December 1939, and this work captures the changing character of the British landscape at a time of conflict. Chalk figures and other prominent landmarks were covered during the war so they could not be used as navigational markers by enemy aircraft. 

The Giant is a familiar landmark, but Ravilious shows it in an unfamiliar state: concealed, vulnerable and transformed by the events taking place around it.

This large-scale painting by John Hubbard offers a very different experience of the British coast. 

Hubbard settled in Dorset in 1961, having been influenced by Abstract Expressionism in New York as well as British artists including Peter Lanyon. Rather than simply recording a particular view, he used layered paint and repeated marks to evoke the cliffs, sea and movement of the Dorset coastline. 

The result is an energetic, immersive work that feels almost as though you are standing within the landscape. It is also a rare opportunity to see a large work from Pallant House Gallery’s collection that is not often on display because of its size.

This recently acquired painting by Helen Saunders offers a fascinating glimpse of the artist before she became one of the two official women members of the Vorticist group. 

Depicting a church and farm in Litlington, East Sussex, Saunders reduces the buildings, trees and surrounding landscape to angular planes. The influence of Paul Cezanne is clear, reflecting the growing interest in Post-Impressionism among British artists at the time. 

Painted before Saunders’s involvement with Vorticism, Barn and Road shows her already moving away from traditional approaches to landscape and towards a more radical, modern way of seeing.

Paul Nash returned to the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire throughout his life, fascinated by their distinctive forms and the sense of history attached to the landscape. 

In Wittenham (1935), he brings together the chalk path, ancient hill fort and sweeping arc of trees in a carefully compressed composition. For Nash, this was not simply a landscape to be observed. He was interested in what he called the “genius loci”, or spirit of place – the idea that a particular landscape can possess its own character and presence. 

The Wittenham Clumps became one of the defining landscapes of Nash’s work, and this watercolour shows why he continued to return to them.

Small in scale but rich in detail, Samuel Palmer’s The Rising Moon (1857) is easy to miss – but well worth seeking out. 

Moonlight was a recurring subject for Palmer, whose highly imaginative landscapes were influenced by William Blake and his own experiences of the countryside around Shoreham in Sussex. Rather than depicting one specific location, The Rising Moon brings together elements drawn from different landscapes Palmer encountered and imagined throughout his career. 

The work also helps to trace the influence of Palmer on later generations of British artists. In 1924, artist William Larkins discovered one of Palmer’s prints in a Charing Cross Road bookshop and described the experience as a revelation.

Discover more British landscape art

These five works offer just a glimpse of the landscapes, artists and ideas explored in British Landscapes: A Sense of Place. From Romanticism and Modernism to postwar abstraction, the exhibition looks at how artists have responded to the changing landscapes of Britain – and the memories, identities and emotions attached to them. 

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place is at Pallant House Gallery until 1 November 2026.