This weekend we’re visiting the rolling chalk Downs in the south of England, including the North and South Downs to the south of London, the Chilterns to the north of the city, and the Berkshire Downs to the west. In the early twentieth century a steady succession of landscape artists moved out from London to live and paint in the hills of southern England.

By 1887, Edward Stott had moved to Amberley at the foot of the South Downs near Arundel in West Sussex, where he lived until his death in 1918. Peaceful Rest is one of his few paintings that was exhibited at the Royal Academy, in this case in 1902. This shepherd has stolen a moment as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and something blue protruding from the shepherd’s jacket pocket. Behind is a shallow chalk cliff at the edge of the Downs.

Stott also painted in pastels. His view of a Chalk Pit near Amberley from 1903 gives a better idea of the rolling chalkland around the village during the harvest, with cut stooks of grain ready for threshing.

At some time in the late summer of 1912, Spencer Gore walked part of The Icknield Way, shown here in his Fauvist view from that year. This is an ancient trackway running from Wiltshire to Norfolk, following the chalk downs of the Berkshire Downs and Chiltern Hills, where he had most probably made sketches of this view of sunset.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s undated view of The South Downs near Eastbourne, East Sussex shows the south-east coast of England during haymaking, with sporadic red poppies in the foreground. The land is otherwise peaceful and deserted, and its sky rises to eternity.

Paul Nash’s autumnal view of the Berkshire Downs was probably painted when he was visiting his father in his home at Iver, in the chalk downland of Berkshire, to the north-west of London.

Nash’s Whiteleaf Cross (1931) might appear unreal, but is quite an accurate depiction of a cruciform hill-carving in Whiteleaf Hill near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, not far from the artist’s family home. On a down set between small woods, a chalk escarpment has been cut with a trench extending to the symbol of a cross above. It is late autumn, with trees devoid of leaves, or their foliage a deep brown.

During the 1930s, Eric Ravilious started spending time in Sussex, where he and his wife became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house at Beddingham, East Sussex, became their second home. He became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934), where a few barbed-wire fences mark its boundaries.

Around 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, Ravilious visited the famous White Horse cut in the chalk downs at Uffington in Berkshire, England. The Vale of the White Horse (c 1939) shows the view from an unconventionally low angle, in pouring rain. This hill figure is thought to date from the late Bronze or early Iron Age, around three millennia ago.

Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made in the period 1939-44, is a lesson in agricultural history. In the distance, on one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, are three horse-drawn ploughs tackling some of the steeper ground, while in the foreground are their successors, the light-wheeled modern tractor. Those are being operated here by women, as most of the men were away serving in the armed forces.

For once I end with a couple of my own paintings, admittedly not in the same league as those above. However, they show the downland where I live, and whose escarpments I walk.

This is the Worsley Obelisk on top of the most southerly downs on the Isle of Wight, looking northwards towards the east-west chalk ridge that runs from Culver Down to the Needles, with the city of Southampton in the far distance. The slopes of these hills are scarred by terracettes, once thought to be created by grazing sheep, but now postulated as being a physical effect on soil.

This view looks east across the village we live in, at Saint Martin’s Down, behind which lie Shanklin and Bonchurch, as shown in two of the paintings in the first of these articles. Since painting this ten years ago, much of the rough grazing on this down has been re-wilding and it’s now dotted with small bushes and scrub.

Some of the performing arts across Europe had their roots not with the affluent upper classes, but as entertainment for the masses. These included the Commedia dell’Arte, and the British music hall that was popular in London and other towns and cities between 1850-1918. These were low-brow theatres that staged variety acts including popular songs, comedy, and anything that might appeal to ordinary working men and women. They originated after about 1830, from entertainment provided in pubs and inns, and like them, music halls also served food and drink.

Although Walter Sickert’s painting of Tipperary dates from 1914, it’s a good example of the origin of the music hall. It shows the artist’s model ‘Chicken’ sat at a pub piano playing the contemporary hit, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. That had swept to popularity with British troops in 1914 as they went off to fight in the trenches on the other side of the Channel.

Before Sickert had taken up painting in 1881, he had tried pursuing a career as an actor, resulting in his lasting interest in performing arts and the music hall in particular. His early painting of Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties. Second Turn of Katie Lawrence from about 1888 shows the dimly lit interior of a music hall, as a young woman sings to an audience that appears unreceptive. Hungerford is a market town around sixty miles to the west of London, and appears to be an unlikely location for this music hall, which is more probably in the west of London.

Another young woman sings from the gloom in Sickert’s The Music Hall, or more cryptically The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror, from 1888–89.

Among more than five hundred music halls around Britain at the time, Sickert made the Bedford in Camden Town, London, his favourite. The first there, known as the Old Bedford, opened in 1861 and was destroyed by fire in 1898. Its successor was the New Bedford, which was larger and even featured electric lighting. Among others who frequented the New Bedford was the novelist Virginia Woolf, and its performers included Charlie Chaplin before it finally closed in 1959.

His view of The Pit at the Old Bedford from 1889 shows the limited accommodation for musicians between the audience and stage.

Sickert sketched Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford in about 1890.

His enthusiasm for music halls inspired others in the Camden Town Group to paint them as well, most notably Spencer Gore.

Gore soon developed a fascination for the theatre and music hall, and in 1906 started regular visits to the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, well-known at the time for spectacular ballets and acrobats. Like Degas and others in Paris, he sketched performances, then turned those into studio paintings. This sketch of The Alhambra Theatre, “On the Sands” was made in 1910, using black chalk and graphite, and appears more compositional in purpose. The artist has squared it up ready to transfer to canvas.

Ballet Scene from “On the Sands” (1910) is Gore’s finished painting. He has amended the foreground structure at the lower left, representing the front of the box or gallery he was seated in, but most of the other details appear faithful to his sketch. He has divided much of his canvas between the ballet on the stage at the upper left, and the musicians in the orchestra pit in the lower right.

Gore’s painting of the musical double act of Inez and Taki (1910) is another of his views from inside the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties. They’re playing antiquated lyre guitars, an odd choice of instrument.

Later in his career, Sickert returned to his enduring theme of music halls in The New Bedford, painted in about 1914-15, capturing the splendour of the interior at its height.

After the First World War, music halls were replaced as public tastes changed, and licensing laws prevented them from serving alcohol. The great majority were closed by the 1960s, when television was taking over as the most popular means of entertainment.