“Presences of Nature: British Landscape 1780-1830,” an exhibition of paintings currently on view at the Yale Center for British Art,[1] is organized on a novel plan. Its curator, Louis Hawes, noting that the experience of nature was the great and original subject of the period in painting, as it was in poetry, has abandoned the usual methods of presenting the British School in terms of masters, mediums, and formal development. In this show great and small, precursors and followers, oils and watercolors all appear together under six headings: Mountain Landscapes, Coastal Scenes, Ruin Landscapes, Rural Landscapes, Landscapes with Laborers, and Townscapes. These were categories of subject matter common at the time the works were painted. An interest in subject matter seems to be shared just now by painters and critics as well as scholars. One effect of the presentation of the Yale show was to turn it into a study not of painting but of images—one wondered why popular prints should be excluded—and the source of these images in the taste, sentiments, and sensibility of the time. To look at paintings this way is to see them in terms of exactly what, if they survived as art, they transcended. In the catalogue to the exhibition,[2]Hawes tells us that sea-bathing became popular at the time since it was considered beneficial to the health, and that this stimulated an interest in coastal scenes. But to depict a coastal scene in a painting does not make nature present there.