Hardy Country Author:Gordon Beningfield, Anthea Zeman With Beningfield's Countryside, which looked lovingly at the area around his home in Hertfordshire, Gordon Beningfield put his vision of the English countryside into a widely admired bestseller. Now he turns his attention to another part of the country that has for long been a source of inspiration to him: to Dorset, and in pa... more »rticular to the part of Dorset that is the heart of Thomas Hardy's Wessex.
Beningfield's Countryside founded its portrait of traditional rural England, not on an idealised picture of the past, but on the artist's observations of the countryside as it survives today. Similarly, while not attempting to recreate scenes from the Wessex novels, Hardy Country finds in the present-day Dorset the atmosphere and feeling as well as the locales of Thomas Hardy.
Gordon Beningfield shows us Dorchester, which is definitely Hardy's Casterbridge, but also the tracts of heathland that Hardy cared a great deal about and fictionally amalgamated as Egdon Heath. He portrays such recognisable Hardy landmarks as Evershot church, which is Evershead church from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the earth castle of Eggardon, Hardy's Eggar, but also a shepherd's hut like Gabriel Oak's on Norcombe Hill, which appears on the map as Toller Down. Here, too, are harvests and fairs, wild creatures and farm animals, hurdle-makers and gipsies, all contributing to a rich evocation of a present-day Dorset that would not have looked at all unfamiliar to Thomas Hardy.
With a hundred pictures, all specially produced for this book, Gordon Beningfield has extended his range as a countryside artist and shows his fascination with the activities of rural life as well as displaying his considerable talent as a landscape artist. Hardy Country will delight the readers of the Wessex novels as much as it will please the large following that Gordon Beningfield has already acquired through Beningfield's Countryside and his appearances on television.« less