Jean-Pierre Gilson has spent four decades photographing the European landscape, and English Landscapes, published by Dewi Lewis in 2023, turns his attention to a countryside that British painters and writers made famous. Since 2016 he has worked through winters in the footsteps of Constable, Gainsborough, Emily Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle and Daphne du Maurier, following routes those figures knew rather than sites arranged for visitors.
The approach is deliberately seasonal. Winter light, mist and low cloud strip the scenery back, so that hedgerows, fields and stands of bare trees carry the composition almost alone. Gilson’s framing is exact and unsentimental, yet the resulting vision can read as romantic, even backward-looking, while remaining plainly contemporary: this is a working rural England that has survived, in places little altered across centuries.
The book holds ninety-six duotone plates across 112 pages, a sequence large enough for the arc of a long project and tightly edited enough to be read as one sustained argument about place. The duotone printing suits the restrained tonal range of the subject, and the hardback format, 24 by 30 centimetres, gives the horizontals room. William Boyd, whose fiction has repeatedly examined British identity, provides the introduction.
For collectors, the interest lies in that combination: a French photographer’s outside eye on a body of terrain already overlaid with native myth, a winter-only method pursued over several years, and a sequence that treats literary inheritance as something to be tested on the ground rather than illustrated. It belongs with the landscape work Gilson has made in Scotland, Ireland and France, and it stands on its own as a considered reading of England’s rural past and present.
A special edition was also issued, pairing the book with a signed and numbered A4 giclée print in a choice of four images, each limited to twenty copies.
