David Inshaw

View the e-catalogue

'The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.' Cézanne

This survey exhibition presents some of the best of Inshaw's work, focusing on the terrain that has been his chief inspiration for more than 50 years. When he first settled in Devizes in 1971, he took as his main subject the ancient landscape of Wiltshire surrounding the town. He has walked the Marlborough Downs and witnessed there the varying lights of dawn, dusk or midday, charged with the emotional undertow of the particular moment. Every painting he makes of this landscape is imbued with memories which serve to make it an intensely felt image, though its autobiographical nature need never be known to the viewer. In this connection, Inshaw likes to quote Thomas Hardy’s phrase ‘the beauty of associations is far superior to the beauty of aspect.’ Inshaw paints the beauty of aspect, but he brings to it an enriching beauty of association. This exhibition, and the accompanying catalogue with a new essay by Dr Andrew Lambirth, the leading authority on Inshaw's work, firmly underlines the centrality of David Inshaw's place in the great tradition of Romantic landscape painting in this country.