From an art critical point of view, it’s not so much that landscape paintings can ‘pick out’ points of geography – there’s a mountain, here’s a town – though of course it can. It is, rather, that  to describe how meaning in landscape painting gets made, geography must be involved. Exactly how and to what extent this happens will vary from artist to artist, work to work; but in general I think we can say that geography gets wrapped up in the medium.

After all, what is the space and layout of a landscape painting but a relationship with the environment? Paintings can propose or forbid routes through the land. They can consider land use. Colour can link human or animal activity to time of day; form and texture can describe geology, and patterns of flora given a context, and so on. All these things are geographical, yet each can be uniquely seen, thought and felt in paint.