On Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945, the end of the Second World War in Europe was marked with celebration across Britain. Streets filled, communities gathered, and a fragile sense of relief took hold. Yet beneath these moments of joy lay a country profoundly altered. Lives, cities and landscapes had been reshaped by conflict, and the process of renewal, both physical and psychological, was only just beginning.

Artists were among those navigating this transition. Many turned to landscape not simply as a subject, but as a way of understanding what had been lost, and what might emerge in its place. Our upcoming exhibition, British Landscapes: A Sense of Place, explores this enduring relationship between people and place, revealing how artists have continually reimagined the land around them in response to moments of change. 

During and after the Second World War, the relationship between artists and landscape became especially charged. The physical and psychological impact of war altered how the world was seen, and how it could be represented.

For Graham Sutherland, the British landscape was irrevocably transformed by destruction. As an official war artist, he documented bombed cities during the Blitz, creating works that capture both material ruin and emotional intensity. In Devastation 1941: City Panorama (1941) buildings are reduced to stark structural forms, their fractured silhouettes set against an eerie, quiet sky.

What lingers is not action, but stillness. A sense of absence permeates the scene, as though the noise of destruction has already passed, leaving only its imprint. These works are not simply records of damage; they mark a shift in British landscape painting towards more expressive and imaginative responses. They attempt to convey the scale of wartime experience beyond what could be directly seen. 

Alongside such depictions of devastation, artists including Paul Nash explored new visual languages to articulate their relationship with the land. Drawing on European avant-garde ideas, Nash moved beyond straightforward representation, seeking instead to evoke what he described as the ‘spirit of place’. 

In works such as Garden of the Madamites (c. 1941–44), the landscape becomes something more elusive – part memory, part imagination. Nash returned frequently to this Dorset location during the war, yet his writings reveal how distant it began to feel. Reflecting in 1941, he described its “quiet tempo” and “rural peace” as almost unreal against the backdrop of global conflict. 

Here, landscape is not fixed. It shifts with perception, coloured by experience. A place once familiar becomes strange, reshaped by the knowledge of war happening elsewhere. Through Nash’s work, we see how even the most tranquil environments can carry the weight of a changed world. 

Taken together, the work of Sutherland, Nash and their contemporaries reveals that war was not a single rupture in British landscape art, but part of a longer, more gradual transformation. From devastation to reflection, and from reflection to renewal, artists reimagined the land as a site of emotional and cultural recovery.

In this context, landscape becomes more than a backdrop. It is a means of processing experience, holding together memory, loss and hope. Through shifting visions of place, we gain insight into how individuals, and societies, respond to profound change.

As we mark VE Day, these perspectives resonate anew. The landscapes shaped in the aftermath of war remind us not only of what has been endured, but of the enduring capacity to rebuild and reimagine.

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place invites you to explore these ideas further, tracing how artists across generations have understood the places around them, and, in doing so, themselves.