Drawn To Nature: Gilbert White And The Artists

Simon Martin Pallant House Gallery £25 ★★★★☆

The ‘parson-naturalists’, those characters who oscillated between the pulpit and the potting shed, embodied

English eccentricity during the 18th and 19th Centuries. And the most famous example is Gilbert White of Selborne, the quirky cleric who wrote a bestseller about the plants, animals and birds that peppered his Hampshire parish.

Since its first edition in 1789, The Natural History And Antiquities Of Selborne has remained in print and enthralled Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Gerald Durrell and many others.

And, as Simon Martin details in Drawn To Nature, it has also been a beacon for generations of nature-loving painters and printmakers.

Martin is the director of the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which last year staged an exhibition about White’s influence on artists. He has now transformed that show into a book that elegantly blends art history and biographical detail with a visual valentine to the English countryside.

In his charming introduction, Sir David Attenborough explains that White was not worried about seeming ‘a little dotty’ as he traipsed around the village observing mice, herons, owls and oaks for his idiosyncratic book. Certainly, it is an unusual curate who notices how swifts mate on the wing. He was, as Attenborough notes, ‘a man in total harmony with his world’.

Over the years, White’s world has been reimagined by a diverse array of artists, famous and forgotten, to illustrate his survey: Eric Ravilious produced wood engravings of the parson and his beloved tortoise,

John Nash created linocuts of streams and sparrowhawks in composted colours of swampy green and teabrown, and John Piper’s watercolours made Selborne look unbearably wet.

And then there were the two Victorians who disguised themselves as sheep to get shots for a photographic edition. No doubt White would have approved of all these imaginative efforts, as he would this joyful volume.