Southern England doesn’t have any mountains or even rugged hills, but rolling Downs. Being uplands you’d have thought they’d be called Ups rather than Downs, but the word has Celtic origins and means a hill fort, as many have been in the distant past. This weekend I invite you to join me on these hills, in the company of some of the artists who have painted them.

Best-known are the North and South Downs, both south of London, while to the north of the capital are the Chilterns, and to the west are the Berkshire Downs. I live in the furthest south of them all, ridges running across the Isle of Wight and dropping into the English Channel.

Under their rich grassland are great whalebacks of chalk, responsible for their roundness and occasional breaks into chalk cliffs. Much of the downland is protected countryside, with scattered woodland and grazing sheep. Although they aren’t high, typically rising to less than 250 metres (800 feet) above sea level, they present short steep ascents for the walker and cyclist, and spectacular views.

It’s only appropriate that my first painting of the North Downs was made by the French artist Théodore Géricault.

In 1820, Géricault accompanied his masterwork The Raft of the Medusa for exhibition in London, and remained in England until the following year. His Epsom Derby painted in 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air without contact with the ground beneath them. The Derby Stakes is a flat race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At that time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here.

A few years later the young and aspiring landscape painter Samuel Palmer spent his formative years between 1826-35 living in Shoreham in the Weald of Kent, an area of sandstone hills between the North and South Downs.

From about 1830, Palmer travelled further from the village of Shoreham, and walked up the nearby downs to paint views from the rolling hills looking over the Weald of Kent, such as The Timber Wain (1833-34). Here a team of oxen is being used to draw a heavy wagon bearing a huge tree trunk down to the village in the valley.

His view of The Weald of Kent from about 1833-34 shows another deep valley below and rolling downs beyond.

Palmer’s view of The Golden Valley from about 1833-34 is an open panorama looking over Underriver, near Sevenoaks in Kent, as an oxcart descends into the valley from the ridge.

In the 1850s, Palmer returned to the rolling downs of the Kent countryside, where he painted this delicate view from Wilmot’s Hill, Kent (c 1851), which makes interesting comparison with his paintings from his time at Shoreham. This is in the chalkland of the North Downs.

During the middle of the nineteenth century a few artists visited the Isle of Wight to paint its chalk downs.

Richard Burchett’s View Across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight was painted from the path that still runs to the west of Saint John’s Church (now known as Saint Blasius’), Shanklin, towards Cliff Copse, in the south of the island. The distant chalk cliffs are the end of Culver Down, at the eastern end of the ridge that runs to West High Down and the Needles in the extreme west.

At Ventnor, Isle of Wight (1856) is a superb watercolour painted by Barbara Bodichon on the coast just a few miles to the south-west of Burchett’s viewpoint. It conforms to the Pre-Raphaelite expectations of landscape painting, and captures the spirit and detail of the chalk cliffs along this stretch of the Channel coast. Painted from near Saint Catherine’s Point, in a friend’s studio, looking east into the dawn sky, it was successfully exhibited at the Royal Academy.

The following year John Brett, the leading Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist, started work on The Stonebreaker (1857-58), at a popular beauty spot in the North Downs, near Box Hill (elevation 224 metres, 735 feet), which dominates the distance. The milestone at the left shows the distance to London as 23 miles, and David Cordingly considers this places it along a historic track known as Druid’s Walk, leading from the Pilgrim’s Way over the Leatherhead Downs to Epsom and London.

Brett made extensive sketches and studies of the motif, worked on the final oil painting for at least twenty days en plein air, but then completed it in the studio during the following autumn and winter. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1858, where it aroused considerable critical interest.

During the winter of 1865-66, Brett’s patron stayed on or near the Isle of Wight, where Brett painted two watercolour landscapes of the Island, of which only February in the Isle of Wight (1866) has been traced. This is where the chalk downs reach the English Channel, probably near Bonchurch in the far south of the island. If that’s correct, the sailing ship in the distance is at the southern end of Sandown Bay, opposite Culver Cliff. This area has suffered major landslips, in 1810, 1818, 1995, and most recently in December 2023.