Art And Yorkshire: From Turner To Hockney, Edited by Jane Sellars, Great Northern Books, £20

Two hundred years separate J M Turner’s palladian views of Harewood House and David Hockney’s arcadian The Road Across The Wolds.

Between 1797 and 1997, parts of Yorkshire changed significantly. You can see it coming in William Cowen’s 1849 picture of Bradford in which the middle ground, the colour of Yorkshire sandstone, bristles with smoking mill chimneys.

Like Turner and Thomas Girtin before him, Cowen’s view of the Yorkshire landscape was rather idyllic – there is a green patch of it decorated with three cows in the foreground of his painting.

“By 1850, Bradford had become the wool capital of the world with a population of 100,000. Cowen’s painting of 1849 therefore romanticises the view by putting an emphasis on the disappearing countryside and playing down the dark satanic mills, thus indicating a sense of nostalgia for a bygone age,” writes Jane Sellars.

The former director of Haworth’s Bronte Parsonage supplied the text and assembled the book’s 120 images – none of which, alas, include Bingley’s popular ‘Janescapist’ Jane Fielder or Holmfirth’s ‘landscapist’ Ashley Jackson.

A pity, that; but then as Alan Bennett points out in his amusing introduction, in his lifetime Atkinson Grimshaw’s eerie moonlit street-scapes of Leeds were reckoned old hat. What would Grimshaw’s startling Tree Shadows On The Park Wall: Roundhay Park, fetch now?

A Russian billionaire could afford it, but not Mr Bennett, whose advocacy of the ownership of paintings is not unexpectedly unusual. “What recommends the ownership of even the most modest painting is that it allows the virtues and the beauty of the picture to creep into one’s affections,” he writes.

Although he speaks French and Russian and once spoke highly to me about American novelists, he’s not one for grand operatic gestures. People are apt to mistake the contrived homeliness of his tone and think of him as a national treasure. Tom Wood’s edgy portrait of him, painted in 1993, ought to dispel that notion.

David Hockney, although voted by the British public as their favourite modern artist, avoided national treasuredom – which is bestowed by the media – by fulminating publically in favour of smoking.

In the world of coffee-table soft-backs, of which this book is an interesting example, the variety of Hockney’s art work is fairly represented and includes one of his youthful Bradford streetscapes as well as the 1983 joiner ensemble of photographs snapped at Ponden Hall – Thrush Cross Grange in Wuthering Heights.

Which brings me, briefly, to the Brontes, whose pictures figure almost as often as Turner’s (Turner wins 10-7, according to my fingers and thumbs). I don’t know if Charlotte really did paint Branwell out of the painting of the three sisters, but I wouldn’t be surprised. She could be a bit of a prig.

Among other worthwhile pictures, you’ll find several by Simon Palmer, who was championed by the late Jonathan Silver; a striking lithograph by Paula Rego; black and white photographs of sailing ships at Whitby by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe; and one by the late Liverpool poet Adrian Henri.

Against a background of an Emily Bronte poem, graves in Haworth churchyard, like grey set-squares, are painted in what looks like a singed circle.

It took me by surprise as did Jonathan Yeo’s full-length portrait of Damien Hirst in a diving suit sitting in a formaldehyde tank.