ABSTRACT
In 1904, in an unprecedented foray into the field of contemporary painting, The Connoisseur published a survey on the current state of 'Landscape in England'. This chapter considers the degree of compliance between early modernism, intent on greater aesthetic autonomy, formal experimentation and a rejection of so-called native traditions, with the wider impulses and insecurities of the Edwardian era. It argues that a significant strand of British landscape painting avoided the prevailing sentimentalities about the countryside and played an active role in pointing the medium towards more formal concerns identified latterly as classically modernist. Modern artists in their chosen travels both shaped and reflected the desires of a growing number of modern tourists. Modernism evolved a formal, visual language with which to counter the fragmentation, the rootlessness and the attenuated sense of self that characterized the experience of modernity as it was described by contemporary sociologists like Ferdinand Tonnies, Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim.
