Open now, the exhibition runs until 25th June 2016 with an opportunity to hear Bridget Macdonald introduce the works in a Bite-Sized talk on 23 April 2016. Talks cost £2 and can be booked on the day. The exhibition is free.

Malvern based Bridget Macdonald is an artist of national reputation, who trained in Fine Art in the mid 1980s at the School of Art and Design, Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Bridget lives and works in Great Malvern, Worcestershire. As well as appearing in the collection at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, her work is in the collections at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, the House of Lords at Millbank, and in private and corporate collections in the UK, the USA,Italy, and France.

Echoes of the towers, herds and trees heavy with fruit seen in Baroque and Romantic painting can be seen in Bridget’s idyllic, and familiar landscapes of Worcestershire and Herefordshire, which merge observation and memory.

This Green Earth sees her landscapes exhibited alongside those of great historic painters including Claude Lorrain, Samuel Palmer and Peter Paul Rubens, rare works on loan to Worcester from the prestigious Ashmolean Museum collection and Manchester Art Gallery, which highlight the timeless yearning for the elusive peace and tranquillity of rural life underpinning much landscape art.

The unique combination of artworks offer new insight into the way artists interact with the landscape they live in and remember from their past. This Green Earth builds on Worcester City Art Gallery and Museums’ ongoing exploration of landscape through recent exhibitions including Skylight Landscape and Stanhope Forbes England.

The comparison between contemporary and historical works reveals how artists have borrowed from one another in their desire to translate real places into paint, in an ongoing cycle of observation and memory.

Bridget Macdonald said: “It is a wonderful privilege to have this opportunity to exhibit my drawings and paintings in the company of exquisite works by Claude Lorrain and Samuel Palmer, those great masters of the relationship between nature and the ideal.”

Emalee Beddoes, Curatorial Assistant Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum said: “This Green Earth brings together landscape painting from Worcestershire itself as well as from the outstanding Ashmolean Collection and from Manchester Art Gallery. We have been delighted by the response to the exhibition so far. Everyone from art historians and artists to people interested in the country side should consider booking in for Bridget’s talk or one of the other Bite-Sized talks taking place during the exhibition to get a real insight into the works on display.”

Paul Spencer-Longhurst, art historian added: “This original and beautiful exhibition brilliantly demonstrates Bridget Macdonald’s unique vision as a leading British landscapist of our time. Her careful and creative assimilation of Old Master traditions with her own experiences and contemporary sensibilities tellingly relates the landscapes of the past and their poetic themes to those of the present day that we all know.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue available for purchase, including an essay by art historian Paul Spencer-Longhurst.