Romancing the stones

If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long been seen as works of art themselves. ‘The whole temple of Avebury may be consider’d as a picture’, enthused the antiquary William Stukeley in 1743, while ‘my God how sculptural’ was Barbara Hepworth’s response to Cornish sites such as the Mên-an-Tol and the Nine Maidens which she encountered after moving to St Ives in 1939. The creative tension between artists and these mysterious presences in the landscape is the subject of Sam Smiles’s engaging book British Art: Ancient Landscapes, published to accompany an exhibition at the Salisbury Museum (until 3 September).

Taking us on a tour of sites, albeit one in which we repeatedly find ourselves back at Stonehenge, Smiles demonstrates how all artists reinvent ancient monuments. Some, he tells us, do it more audaciously than others: oddly, it is in a drawing purporting to be a sober work of documentation that we see the most outlandish results of imaginative engagement.