Spring fever

Nature's ebullient reawakening, whether celebrated through allegory or minutiously painted in all its blossom-laden glory, has captured the imagination of painters from Botticelli to Hockney. Michael Prodger revels in the season's artistic beauty.

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IN 1814, in Book 1 of his long poem The Excursion, William Wordsworth described the landscape as it emerged tentatively after winter: on a 'sunny bank', he wrote, 'the primrose flower peeped forth, to give an earnest of the Spring'. It is not perhaps his best line, but, nevertheless, some 30 years later, John William Inchboldan adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was inspired enough to paint a literal and descriptive picture of the image Wordsworth had evoked. A Study, In March was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855.

Inchbold would spend the later part of his life abroad, but in this picture of an upland ridge lit by a low sun, he captured an archetypal British spring in which Wordsworth's words have been interpreted in crisp and minute detail. John Ruskin, the great evangelist of 'truth to Nature', praised Inchbold for his fidelity to what he saw. The ewe and her lamb may be at the centre of the painting, but each element, from the distant trees and the play of light to the primroses and clouds, is just as much its subject. The clichés of spring are here combined without a hint of cliché. Nature, warming and stretching after months of cold, is depicted with crystalline clarity and in doing so, Inchbold found a poetry that Wordsworth's line did not really contain.

Spring is, indeed, a natural season for artists and not only for landscape painters; if winter offers a muted palette and paredback scenery, the return of growth and verdancy are full of artistic promise, too.