Throughout history, people have felt the urge to shape the landscape around them. This exhibition will explore the relationship between art, gardens and landscape through a beautiful array of paintings, drawings and sculpture from across the country.

From the formal grounds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to smaller flower-filled gardens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, artists and gardeners have made their mark on nature. Still today, environmentally conscious land artists undertake earth moving schemes which echo the grand planting schemes of the past.

Featuring paintings by Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and JMW Turner, plans by some of the greatest garden designers in history, such as Capability Brown, as well as contemporary works by  Anya Gallaccio and Ian Hamilton Finlay, this exhibition will allow you to consider the enduring relationship between art and landscape up to the present day and beyond.

Have these artistic visions of the ideal landscape warped our concept of what is truly natural? How can art work together with nature to reverse the decline of our green spaces?

Image: JMW Turner, c1827-8, The Lake, Petworth, Sunset; Sample Study, Tate (Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856), Photo Tate