Glorious Nature

Combining beauty and innovative technique, these 91 watercolors and oils by John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, John Ruskin, Edward Lear, Thomas Rowlandson, Samuel Palmer and 38 other artists reveal British landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries as a dynamic, transformative interaction with nature. ``England's natural landscape spoke to English people . . . in languages unheard before,'' notes one of the volume's five scholarly essays which traces echoes of this phenomenon in the writings of Wordsworth, Keats and Austen. This jewel-like catalogue of an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum also includes essays on Turner's radical visual experiments, the impact of cartography on landscapists, and how artists like Gainsborough invested landscape painting with high moral seriousness. Baetjer, a curator at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, coordinated the exhibit. (Jan.)