This enchanting late-19th-century oil painting by British artist William Gosling RBA (1824-1883) depicts a glade within a majestic wood. Gosling was a well-regarded painter of landscapes.A pressing question, often foremost in the mind of any young aspiring landscape artist, is how far one should accurately reflect nature as it sprawls out before them in all its unerring complexity. For centuries, the old masters were expected to ‘idealise’ - study the elements, yet arrange them in a manner befitting the divine, essentially as God intended. While in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Romantics tried to allude to the sensation of being among nature, whipping up its melodrama for emotional effect.But during the mid-19th century, the emphasis switched to something entirely different - painting the truth. Every craggy rock, mossy hillside, rutted path, and sullen cloud. Hordes of British painters gathered up their kit and headed for the countryside, painting from life as fa...