Mousehold Heath, by John Crome, c. 1810–13
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Mousehold Heath

John Crome (British, 1768–1821)

c. 1810–13

Medium
etching
Classification
Print
Culture
England, 19th century
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
Credit line
John L. Severance Fund
Rights
Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed

View at the Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

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.