ABSTRACT
In Britain, landscapes were the products of an urban gaze which spread out to the villages and countryside creating and celebrating this binary. Landscapes and maps complemented each other: the short focus views of the landscapes enacting a spectacular drama. Topographic and landscape paintings borrowed from the science of perspective and precision in ordering a sight in aesthetic terms. In aesthetising the peripheries and interiors of the dominion, these proved to be greatly effective in shaping the country as a whole. For a people, the very act of inhabiting a characteristic and historically allusive native landscape evoked a sense of belonging and therefore resolved the problem of legitimacy without altering allegiances and loyalties to local provinces. The landscape invoked an illusion of unified Britain and tried to obliterate the memory of contemporary disunity.
