National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

De Wint is widely known for his expansive vistas of flat landscape executed with a confident breadth of handling. His peaceful, open, often sunny, always optimistic and productive landscapes and rural scenes seem oblivious to, or perhaps consciously avoid, the social upheavals of his time, brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As the novelist William Thackeray wrote, ‘[One] might have called for a pot of port at seeing one of De Wint’s haymakings … everything basked lazily for him, and one wondered whether he remained torpid in winter’.1 De Wint’s works are nostalgic and romantic scenes of reaction. He produced simple watercolour sketches of Dutch-like flat landscapes, often taken around Lincoln in south-eastern England. They showed grain-harvesting and haymaking, or conventionally imposing views that included such institutional subjects as cathedrals, county houses and castles. De Wint painted the subject of Kenilworth Castle many times. This is a large exhibition watercolour, the biggest and most hig