The Artist and the landscape

In a period when English landscape painting was flourishing, DeWint made a highly individual contribution to the genre via his own technical innovations with watercolour, combining a fluent and spontaneous use of the medium with a fresh and direct eye for the most unassuming scenes and places in the English countryside.

DeWint made frequent sketching excursions through Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire and Norfolk, and along the valleys of the Trent and the Thames. Many of his favoured scenes of harvesting or haymaking however, were found in lowland settings, particularly in and around Lincoln, where he regularly spent his summers, and where the surrounding countryside provided him with the wide, panoramic views he generally preferred. His lifetime covered a period of intense social, cultural and economic change in the agricultural landscape, but his status as a Romantic landscape painter has meant that his work is often viewed as being somewhat nostalgic in its manner, and that his treatment of the agricultural landscape somehow ignores these changes. Some works show however subtly a real awareness of the realities and the transformation of country life at this time.