Our English Coasts by William Holman Hunt. 1852. Holman Hunt was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites studied directly from nature, using detailed observation and clear, bright, sharp-focus technique.

David Dimbleby/Richard Humphreys/Christine Riding

CR He has basically painted every last detail that he saw in this landscape in this painting so it has this very strange heightened reality feel to it...

DD It's what people would call photographic isn't it, some people would use the word photographic in a sneering way, but in truth you do see these brilliant greens at particular times of day, I mean the shadows are quite long on that field and so the sun is quite low and it is exactly the colour that you get...

RH The other thing you notice is that his colours are in the shadows as well...

CR well I like the fact you've got the reflection of light, this is the sheep that's actually the nearest to us on the lower right actually has sun shining through the sort of thinner areas of it's ear which are just astonishing detail. Narrator: Hunt was also deeply religious, and used painting to express a moral message. DD The south coast and the cliffs have always been used as an image of Britain defiant, Britain standing alone

RH There actually were invasion scares at the time he painted this in the 1850s and so that would have obviously registered with the people looking at the picture and the other thing is that everybody seemed to frightfully concerned that people weren't going to church anymore and he's written about this so this is not art-historical over interpretation almost every square inch of a Hunt has got some significance, and he tells you so, er... the sheep were the flock who were in danger of, so to speak, going over the edge.

CR but the other aspect of course is that who is defending these sheep? These people are the English nation, who are in peril of invasion from France who exactly is looking after them? And so Holman Hunt seems to be suggesting that the nation itself is actually being left prone as it were to foreign invasion so although we look at it as a landscape with sheep at the time it was thought to be much more resonant and much more layered as well as a sort of exemplifying this very revolutionary pre-Raphaelite style.