WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art is the first venue in the United States to show the special exhibition, Pastures Green: The British Passion for Landscape.

Drawn from the remarkable collections of the Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, the exhibition includes more than 60 works by pre-eminent artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Richard Long, and many others spanning five centuries from the 1660s to the early 2000s. Pastures Green offers new insights into the importance and role of landscape painting during this time of rapid change, both in Wales and throughout Great Britain, and is on view Dec. 23, 2014 through April 5, 2015. This exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales.

Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at the National Museum Wales, and co-curator of the exhibition, will lead a Pasture’s Green Curator’s Conversation at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 8, 2015.

Beginning in Britain in the late 18th century and spreading throughout the world, the Industrial Revolution irrevocably changed the course of human history, affecting every aspect of culture from the economy to social relations. During this time, Britain saw a shift away from a primarily agrarian, rural way of life, which, paradoxically, spurred the development of landscape painting as a flourishing, independent genre. Through its focus on man’s place in nature, landscape painting shed light on these social and environmental changes.

Broadly chronological, the exhibition is divided into six thematic sections, unfolding a story that runs from the Industrial Revolution through the eras that saw the emergence of Romanticism, Impressionism, and Modernism, to the postmodern and postindustrial present. They are:

Classical Visions and Picturesque Prospects explores the 17th-century origins of landscape painting, including works by two of the fathers of the genre, Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, along with British works by Joseph Wright of Derby, Richard Wilson and others. Wright’s The Lake of Albano (1790) introduces an important sub-theme running through the exhibition: British artists traveling abroad in search of compelling landscape subjects.

• Turner and the Sublime: At the heart of this section are two major oil paintings by J.M.W. Turner, who is often described as “the painter of light.” The Storm (1840–1845) and The Morning after the Wreck (circa 1840) remind the viewer of the futility of human endeavor in the face of nature’s awesome power.

• Truth to Nature focuses on the British interest in the direct and detailed depiction of the natural world. In the celebrated A Cottage in a Cornfield (1817), John Constable pays tribute to his native East Anglia, finding poetry in the details of rural scenery and capturing with uncanny exactitude momentary shifts in the cloudscape of Suffolk.

• Picturing Modernity looks at artistic depictions of the changing landscape in tandem with the growth of cities, revealing new ways of life experienced by an increasingly urbanized population. From the earliest days of industrialization, artists such as Paul Sandby and John “Warwick” Smith were captivated by the strange and unprecedented world of machinery and mining, iron forging, and textile manufacturing, which were the basis of Britain’s prosperity.

• Monet and Impressions of Britain: During a period of self-imposed exile in England due to the Franco-Prussian War, Claude Monet made the Thames his own. In this section, Monet’s The Pool of London (1871) captures with remarkable boldness the energy of one of the busiest ports in the world. Returning to London in 1899, he painted the visionary Charing Cross Bridge (1902) from a fifth-floor balcony at the Savoy Hotel.

• Neo-Romantic to Post-Modern: With the foreboding international climate of the 1930s, landscape came to symbolize all that was valuable in British culture. A group led by Graham Sutherland and John Piper espoused Neo-Romanticism, a return to the traditional picturesque subjects of Constable and Turner. This work was often brooding in tone. The section looks at this movement, which eventually led to landscape art influenced by modern environmentalism.

Pastures Green is curated by Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, and Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at the Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales.