Sublime Landscapes

Free entry, donations welcome

Barbour (watercolour) gallery

The main entrance to this exhibition is via the flight of stairs near the café/play area, but alternative access by lift can be arranged. Please speak to a member of staff.

Sublime Landscapes features landscape watercolours and prints from the Laing Art Gallery’s collection responding to the potential for landscape art to be awe-inspiring. Visitors will encounter dramatic waterfalls, epic ruins, stormy seas, and subterranean worlds through the eyes of artists working between the eighteenth century – when the concept of the ‘sublime’ first gained prominence within landscape art - and the present day.  

The artists on display include John Robert Cozens, Mary Elizabeth Bennett, Francis Towne, David Cox, John Martin, Charles Napier Hemy, Edna Clarke Hall, Graham Sutherland, and Dennis Creffield.  

The exhibition also presents the first opportunity to see three new acquisitions presented by the Contemporary Art Society in 2024-5. These are: Totes Meer by Christiane Baumgartner, and Broken Terrain and Reynisdrangar by Emma Stibbon. The acquisitions were selected both due to their resonance with the historic watercolours collection and with the aim of building the gallery’s holdings of contemporary works on paper by women artists. 

Emma Stibbon, Broken Terrain, mixed method intaglio print, 2017. Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 2024/5. Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Emma Stibbon