British landscape painting can trace its origins to a 17th century printmaker from Prague, Wenceslaus Hollar. Landscape painting developed almost incidentally as a background to prospects, portraits of large country houses commissioned by their wealthy landowners. Hitherto the vast tracts of unfenced common land had been regarded as a void around civilization and unworthy of record. However, during the 18th century, it became fashionable to paint ruins, and with the onset of the Romantic Movement in the 1770s, mountains and moors were no longer regarded as wild, uncouth and unsavoury places. The Lake District became the height of fashion. Landscape has often played a deceptive part in social history. In times of war, when bread was in short supply, harvest scenes reached new heights of popularity, and during the most miserable periods of the industrial revolution, there was scarcely a townscape to be seen. Victorian poverty was made cosy with pictures of rose-encrusted cottages and idyllic landscapes. And today, in the age of the train, the car and huge noisy farm machinery, a naive nostalgia and myth-making still pervades portrayals of the British countryside - unpolluted in painting by mechanization. The book is divided as follows: the introduction covers the changing use of the British countryside and shows how this affected the changing fashions of painting. The history chronicles the development of regional painting schools and the lives and work of the giants in landscape painting. The gazetteer covers some 250 places, listing the artists who lived and worked there. All the great painters are covered, as well as many interesting but less well-known ones. This book is a companion volume to British Painters of the Coast and Sea, by Charles Hemming, who is also the author of Paint Finishes.