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This section of the exhibition is devoted to East Anglia - from North Essex to the Wash, the East Midlands to the North Sea.

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It is about the 'flatlands' that inspired a distinctive, realist aesthetic and produced some of our most important landscape painters - Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and the artists of the Norwich School.

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The section includes Gainsborough's most important early landscape Cornard Wood, a major loan from the National Gallery, which gave 'roots' and a mode of expression to the Norwich artists, such as John Crome, and to Constable, whose art has come to epitomise English rural scenery - not only for British people but around the world.

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All these artists shared a love of Dutch landscape painting and were profoundly influenced by it.

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The Norwich artists, led by Crome, painted their own Norfolk, whose open fields, rivers and coasts fell naturally into the manner of Ruisdael or Rembrandt.

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Among the more recent works in this section are those by Cedric Morris, Richard Billingham and Gilbert and George's The Nature of Our Looking, a composite work featuring photographs of the artists walking in the fields on the Suffolk/Essex border.

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