Places of the Mind focuses on landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern age, challenging the perception that the best British watercolors were produced between 1750 and 1850. Drawing on the British Museum's impressive collection, this book demonstrates the way in which artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the tradition of renowned landscape artists Constable and Turner but developed and extended the genre, focusing on the changing nature of the British countryside during the Industrial Revolution and two world wars.

Published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, the book includes works by Victorian artists Sir Edward John Poynter and John Singer Sargent, and by many well-known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.