This book traces for the first time a length of green heritage in English art. During the past two centuries especially, English artists have envisioned the pastoral mode. Their pastoral art uses landscapes of home - often quite specific localities - to shape vision. The history begins with Samuel Palmer, who transplanted the act of vision from his mentor William Blake s heroic figures into the soil of English landscape art. Palmer s landscape vision was more influential than has yet been recognised. His tradition has been enriched by artists of every subsequent generation, from Nash via...