Mousehold Heath

As with most of Crome’s landscapes, the scenery depicted is located close to his Norwich home. Mousehold Heath, with its panoramic view and low-lying horizon, is the most dramatic of the artist’s thirty-three etchings. The foreground of untamed, uncultivated land is juxtaposed with windmills in the background, signs of man’s attempt to harness nature and make it complicit in its own taming and domestication. The stormy, windswept sky indicates the true character of such natural forces to be ultimately uncontrollable.