Alan Powers

Pevsner characterises Blake with »flaming line«. As a painter and engraver alike, Gibbs is certainly a man of line, and like Blake, he keeps shapes and objects afloat in space in his work. Constable and the Picturesque I will lump together. Here we are talking about sensitive provincialism of the kind that ploughs a furrow on the same relatively narrow patch, from which a universal sensitivity grows visible.