'Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter' (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle until February 28 2026): Little Goes Large

William Beilby's River Landscape Seen Through Trees, 1774, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle

It is a brave curator who decides to stage an exhibition of miniatures. Never going to be spectacular, it can look meagre on the walls and it always requires an extra effort on the part of visitors, here, for instance, offered magnifying glasses to peer through. In Miniature Worlds the Laing Art Gallery has taken up the challenge and run with it, presenting a show of 130 works (most of them loans) in paint, print and even sculpture which celebrate 'little' art from Thomas Bewick up to the present day. With Bewick, of course, they have a trump card - a popular, local name - and they also hitch a ride on the Turner anniversary juggernaut with ten of his works from Tate. More importantly, this is a cleverly staged show which has clearly thought about the difficulties of display. 

Their opening information board and  'poster' choice sets the scene: William Beilby's River Landscape Seen Through Trees has a theatrical magicality as he stage sets his background and we are encouraged to mentally shrink and enter his world. His palette is continued in the cool, green Wind in the Willows walls which provide a gentle background which subtly references the landscape theme - later we shift to stone grey. Respite is offered in the comfy chairs of the Book Discovery Zone. And who can fail to be buoyed up by the sight of Mrs Tittlemouse?

One of the great things about this exhibition is how it champions printmaking, especially in wood. Bewick's 'Tyneside's Tiny Masterpieces' (as they are dubbed here) have an infectious combination of skill, charm and humour. William Blake, who could have a miniature exhibition all of his own, is represented by his only series of wood engravings from Virgil's Pastorals,  so rustically rough and dense that they resemble wood grain itself and make Samuel Palmer's etched Herdsman's Cottage look like an exercise in sophistication. We see John Tenniel who drew his designs for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland directly onto woodblocks. There is also a focus on the twentieth century revival with the likes of Eric Ravilious and Claire Leighton, both of whom create a compelling strength and certainty in their work which belies the small scale.

JMW Turner, The Alps (The Alps at Daybreak), for Rogers’s ‘Poems’, c.1830–2, Tate

Names more associated with painted, grandscale drama, like Turner and John Martin demonstrate their quiet side: Martin belligerently cramming a cast of thousands onto a piece of paper; Turner taking a minimalist approach which conjures the Alps' solid rock out of a few brushstrokes, revealed as through a half-defrosted window. However, the real pleasure comes from seeing artists who devoted themselves to the small: Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter may be often downgraded to mere 'illustrators' but their mastery of their material is beyond doubt. I am reminded of the nostalgic warmth of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies exhibition recently at Lady Lever (Greenaway is also the subject of an exhibition at Burgh House in London at present). 

The Modern Visions section offers up new names and an interesting challenge to the perception that contemporary artists tend to go large or go home. Paul Coldwell's sculptures are small worlds in themselves. Joanna Whittle's luminous frames within frames literally enshrine landscapes. Vicken Parsons evokes infinite space and shifting clouds with a few brushstrokes on wood. At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Hamilton homes in on the ultra-specific, in a grainy, granular close-up that creates it's own soft-focus memorialisation. The Chapman brothers' Goya-esque vignettes seem jarringly out of kilter in this world of wonder and strangeness.

Miniature Worlds is a triumph of a show. By the end, rather like playing with a doll's house, reality seems to shrink and we, the viewers, become giants looking intently in. What starts as effort becomes a joy of small things and close looking. Calming, therapeutic, rewarding, who would have thought you could get so much out of so little.

'The Life of the Fields' (St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, until January 10 2026)

Eric Ravilious, The Downs in Winter, 1935, Towner, Eastbourne

St Barbe's The Life of the Fields is part social history, part call for action , all wrapped up in a broad survey of agricultural landscape art over the last hundred years. One of the main problems which has to deal with is that we inevitably view rural images as, at best, nostalgic and, at worse, twee. So, on the surface this looks like a show dedicated to safe, old-fashioned images which have more in common with the nineteenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The intention is a history of the visual representation of agricultural since the First World War which tackles questions of changing farming practices and changing attitudes to the countryside. The curators are determined to make you look behind the cliches and the prejudices and see these images as both authentic and important. I am not sure it entirely succeeds in its intention, but it is varied, wide-ranging and very satisfying show.

The exhibition sets out its stall as social commentary with divisions into sections like farming practices and rural architecture, and ends with a group of contemporary works which represent farming today. It takes a deliberately wide definition of visual culture to incorporate Charles Tunnicliffe's Ladybird book illustrations and propaganda posters like Frank Newbould's Your Britain, Fight for it Now, as well as significant numbers of printworks from Clare Leighton's wood engraving January to John Nash's humorous lithograph Harvesting, produced as part of the School Prints initiative. There is a good balance of familiar and less familiar names: George Clausen and Lauren Knight sit alongside James Bateman and Thomas Hennell - certainly new to me. Equally, because this is thematically curated there is a huge range of juxtaposed styles. John Arnesby Brown's Millet-influenced Spring has Romanticism in its lowering sky; Eric Ravilious transforms the Downs in Winter with a undulating fluidity in which the roller looks almost like a ship adrift at sea; Frances Hodgkins imbues the Broken Tractor with organic surrealism; Julian Opie reduces fields to minimalist linearity.

John Arnesby Brown, Spring, Southampton City Art Gallery 

The exhibition is very good at contextualising these disparate representations, both in history and in personal experience. Some of the producers were themselves from a rural background, others found themselves in the countryside by chance - Ethelbert White was sent to work on the land in Devon as a conscientious objector - and for many more it was a place of retreat. Harry Epworth Allen was a World War One amputee who travelled round by bus; Kechie Tennent and her husband, who had been imprisoned as a 'conchie', retreated to rural Norfolk after his release; Stanley Anderson moved out of London to escape the Blitz. The importance of agricultural production during both world wars gets good coverage. St Barbe can claim to have pioneered the rediscovery of Evelyn Dunbar with their 2006 exhibition and she is represented here with A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Randolph Schwabe shows the Land Army working alongside German PoWs; Edward Burra has soldiers bringing in the harvest. Equally, the wartime drive for productivity can be seen in the increased presence of mechanisation in post-War works like Norman Neasom's Woolas Hall.

The great irony of the exhibition is that all these works are painted at a time which postdates the golden age of agriculture and the great population shift from country to town. They are all intrinsically nostalgic even when purporting to be factual observation, and in their determination to be unsentimental there is I think an under-acknowledgement of this on the part of the curators. The long legacy of landscape painting underpins much of the work here, sometimes overtly, as in Robin Tanner's debt to Samuel Palmer, often obliquely. The huge sky with its churning clouds and Jesus-rayed sun in James Lynch's The Last of the Harvest, Mere Down is evocatively elegiac, and not just because it tops industrialised rectilinear fields. The lone figure in Tennant's Ploughing bent effortfully into his work at the same angle as the tree behind, is a figure from Hardy or Clare, or even a Medieval Book of Hours.

I suspect for many visitors, the factual, socio-historical context will be an appealing and instructive way into the art, so I am not going to moan too much. This is a thoroughly-researched and endlessly interesting survey (there is also an accompanying catalogue). It will introduce you to artists, stir memories, evoke emotions and stimulate you to make connections. The time and effort spent by the curators should not be underestimated. Once again, a 'provincial' museum has put on an exhibition which everyone deserves the chance to see.