“What is it about the English countryside?” the author Dodie Smith asked in her novel I Capture the Castle. “Why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?” The question has fascinated artists for centuries. Shaped by tectonic plates and human farming, England’s hills, woods, fields, and river valleys are a template of memory and emotion. Clare Leighton’s wood engraving The Farmer’s Year (1932) captures the eternal work of plowing and planting. The sculptor Barbara Hepworth understood landscape as an array of sensations, not just a fixed image. From Thomas Gainsborough to Eric Ravilious, the meaning of the land has been in continual flux. At Pallant House, vistas that have touched artists from the 18th century to the 20th are on view. —Maggie Turner