Michelle Dovey (Oxford 1972) is a painter whose work takes as a starting point the depiction of trees, singly or in landscape. Using oil on canvas, the tree might be depicted against a monochrome background used to offset the trunk and branches; or, as in the case of Two Copses on Mounds the trees are embedded into a landscape with a background sky vividly contrasting the light and dark elements of the canvas, a chiaroscuro. Painted in impasto, at first glance Two Copses on Mounds is a realist landscape. Quickly though, the viewer discerns an historical dimension to this form of depiction.

It's as if the copses are stylised and, set against a pink cloud-streaked blue sky, are a reminder of Poussin’s arcadian visions, as well as English landscape painting, notably Constable. If for Poussin, landscape was part of the classical allusion to the pastoral, for Constable it fitted in with that naturalising element of the shaped and cultured landscape which was part of the agrarian revolution as much as it was the domain of the landscape architects for the great houses which came to be built in his century. Brute nature, the nature of subsistence farming and peasant smallholdings of the Middle Ages, gives way to the gentleman farmer and new landowner who, after the start of enclosures, wished to erase references to agricultural labour.