aAR's editor ambles through a number of ideal landscapes to discover that the impulse to record the natural world remains an undiminished instinct for painters.

Arcadia, a Greek word which came to embody the idea of rustic perfection, derives from a place of relative isolation in antiquity - a Greek province of Arcady, in the Peloponnese. The idea of a place associated with natural beauty and unspoilt by the depredations of man has preoccupied poets and painters since antiquity - and endures today.

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Image: Paul Bril, View of Bracciano, early 1620's, Rome, oil on canvas, 74.5 x 163.6cm. Roy and Marjorie Edwards Bequest Fund and the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2007. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.