A Sweet View The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews

 A Sweet View

The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews is a new book released  November 24 by Reaktion. 

The title Sweet View is taken from a phrase expressed by Jane Austen when, writing, described in the book Emma what she was seeing as "a sweet view." 

An enchanting nature,the british one: I fall in love for example for a website called Pictures of England, where you  find wagons of pictures of a stunning british countryside.

This book analyzes british painters in love for their countryside, but also what writers said on the stunning, fresh and perpetually harmonic british lands, with its specific characteristics as for example, churches,  cottages, castles. In general their observations were the ones of enchanted people in a wonderful and idylliac world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "England is a garden... Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a

plough."

Horace Walpole complained: there were few paintings and few painters interested in portraying the beautiful and fresh british countryside.

Frederick Law Olmsted built Central Park and once in England remained enchanted by what he saw.

John Constable created with his The Cornfield, firstly appeared in public in 1826, the perfect scenario of the rural countryside.

A book analyzing portraits of estimated painters and written words of beloved writers for giving to the reader the exact poeticity felt and seen in the past like in the present: the key makers of the so-called "South Country rural idyll goes to painters like Palmer, Birket, Foster and Jefferies. 

Beautifully arugumented and illustrated, goes for it if you are fascinated by countrysides, and the beauty and fascination of it.

Highly recommended.

I thank Reaktion for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori