The Quiet Observer of the British Landscape Born in the village of Mattishall in the United Kingdom, William Buck entered a world that was beginning to find a new way of seeing the natural landscape. He was a painter who sought to capture the specific character of the terrain, moving through the countryside with a keen eye for the subtle shifts in light and topography. His life, which spanned from the early nineteenth century until the turn of the next, was defined by this steady devotion to the visual truth of the land. His brushwork was an attempt to translate the physical presence of the e…