Two opera-goers in full evening dress sit before a folding table on the manicured lawns of Glyndebourne. They appear almost comically oblivious to a group of dairy cows closing in on the picnic. Tony Ray-Jones’s 1967 photograph is all affectionate mockery – of the couple, carrying on exactly as if they were at home, of the posh costume in the rural landscape, and most particularly of the proximity of man and beast, apparently separated by no land at all (the artist’s brilliant illusion is to conceal the ha-ha between lawn and field).
Land and landscape, and the difference between them – this is the subject of Tate Liverpool’s fascinating exhibition. There are plenty of painted landscapes on show, it is true, from Constable’s luxuriantly verdant Flatford Mill to Paul Nash’s eerie standing forms to the rolling Wiltshire hills of Eric Ravilious, pictures of horses cut into the chalk. And there are many films, photographs and videos of land that is farmed, mined, mapped, walked or occupied. But you are in no doubt from the start that it is the coincidence of the two that matters here – who owns what, and what they do with the land.
