The role of artist-in-residence at an institution such as Dulwich Picture Gallery comes replete with contradictions and difficulty. How does a contemporary artist begin to engage with the art of the past, particularly the art of the 17th and 18th centuries? How does such an artist envisage his or her place within the apparently restrictive confines of a historic site and gallery? Doesn’t ‘England’s oldest public art gallery’ carry a burden of establishment expectation that is inherently oppressive to the creative spirit? Well, the answer to the last should, of course, be an emphatic no – there is very little that is oppressive about the atmosphere at Dulwich seen from the busy and dynamic Education Department, with whom the artist-in-residence is based. A challenge there is, certainly. But much of the value of this initiative is in watching the process of that engagement and the extraordinary diversity of the resulting works of art.

Anderson was born in Birmingham, of Jamaican descent; he has family in Jamaica and many of his works of art find inspiration in that landscape. His is a career on the cusp of the big time; having studied at Wimbledon School of Art and later at the Royal College of Art, his paintings have been attracting considerable notice. His first solo show, The Lime, was held at David Risley Gallery, London, in 2003; and another exhibition took place at the Thomas Dane Gallery in 2005, where the works drew on his extended stay in Trinidad and Tobago.

Hurvin Anderson’s period as artist-in-residence has been particularly intriguing. Anderson’s paintings have been thought of as a modern take on ‘Arcadia’, featuring parks, beaches and other places of leisure; but they also have an undercurrent of social unease. This would seem to signal that the artist might find Dulwich Picture Gallery’s history and perceived elitism as an obstacle. Certainly, Anderson unpeeled the onion, as it were, from a safe distance at first. His first engagement with the site was firmly from the outside, inspired by a reproduction on the office stairs of Gandy’s brilliant watercolour showing multiple views of Soane’s Gallery. Anderson started with a series of photos of the exterior and perimeter of the site, which he printed together onto stretched paper and in some cases painted over, highlighting some details and clouding others. However, he was not satisfied, feeling that this tack did not vary sufficiently from either his illustrious model, or indeed from the expectations that others had of his work.

Gradually, he made his way inside, taking full advantage of the privilege of taking up residence in the Gallery on Mondays when closed to visitors. The sketches and photographs he took then are fascinating. They focus on the frames and the architecture, in other words, the geometry of the place. These sketches contain no indication that the frames contain the work of other artists from different eras – they are shapes against the bigger shapes of walls. Often he pictures himself sitting with his back to us, soaking up the geometry. These are far from edited ‘snapshots’, however – what has caught the artist’s eye is the compositional strength of the Gallery’s interior, the sense of balance within the ‘historic’ hang of the paintings.

When Anderson finally allowed his eye to come to rest on the paintings themselves, he ended up focussing particularly on two, A Roman Road after Nicholas Poussin, and A View on the Rhine, by Herman Saftleven, 1656. Two more different pictures, art-historically speaking, you could not wish for: the first all classical order and linear perspective, the second all Brueghelian detail and aerial perspective. And yet they have much in common. Both are, crucially, landscapes; both feature a major thoroughfare, one a road, the other a river; both dispose humanity decoratively in relationship with the landscape; both, in very different ways, suggest landscapes hushed and motionless, yet inhabited; neither tells an obvious story and yet both are hugely suggestive, as if the road on one hand, and the river on the other, represent something greater, some allegorical representation of humanity’s passage through the world. Described in this way, Anderson’s choice seems anything but arbitrary – these are amongst the themes that he likes, albeit transposed to different climes and to contemporary life.

Looking again at one of his earlier sketches within the Gallery, the compositional echo of Poussin’s A Roman Road suddenly jumps out at you. In Anderson’s view of Gallery 13 we look towards the cloister beyond, the path disappearing away from the viewer while a figure (the artist) sits to one side. This recalls Poussin’s mysterious figure sitting against a square tomb, while the road itself leads off into the centre of the painting. Maybe the vocabulary and grammar are different, but Anderson and Poussin are emphatically speaking the same language.

It was this painting, then – Poussin’s Roman Road – which jumped into Hurvin Anderson’s mind one evening in Jamaica on a visit to his sister’s home. The landscape surrounding his sister’s place exhibits a common enough phenomenon in Jamaica, apparently – other people have started building there, but either abandoned the sites or left them half-completed for now. Building materials litter the view, a road has been laid, and the whole scene is bounded by the mysterious jungle beyond.

On this particular evening, Anderson spotted a young man, who chose, arbitrarily, to sit himself down on a pile of discarded breezeblocks beside the road to make a call on his mobile phone. The young man was thus part of the scene, and idly engaging with the view – but, of course, also ‘elsewhere’ in his head, talking to his friend. Anderson was reminded forcibly of Poussin’s sitting man, who has that same feeling of being ‘in’ the landscape, but not part ‘of’ it. The Roman road of Poussin is a symbol of the culture that created it, the culture of classical civilisation, of imperial dominance and world power – all such roads, we remember, ‘lead to Rome’. Anderson’s road, by contrast, as yet leads nowhere, and the unfinished buildings and piled-up building materials offer a formidable contrast to the relics of a great civilisation. The painting acquires a powerful social comment on modern civilisation and the particular problems of Jamaica through this comparison.

Two large paintings have emerged from this. Hurvin Anderson often works his ideas through in series of two or three paintings, each of which achieve a resolution in themselves, from which he can start another version saying something subtly different. The first of the two has been left at a stage where singing colour and the structure of the landscape are left to make their own impact; the second focuses the mind on a sense of unease and melancholy centred on the atmosphere and on the solitary figure.

The other large painting on show in this exhibition, Anderson’s View of the Rio Cobre uses Herman Saftleven’s A View on the Rhine as its starting point. Anderson’s painting shares the diagonal dynamic of Saftleven’s composition, and its lush leafy atmosphere. But this is a very different, Jamaican landscape. Saftleven’s river and forests teem with life – villagers dance, play musical instruments, feast, walk, work the vineyards, and conduct their daily lives amongst the trees of the shoreline, while the river heaves with barges and all the paraphernalia of the Rhine’s great river commerce. All human life is here. Not so on the Rio Cobre – Anderson has chosen a single incident derived from an early 20th century newspaper cutting, happening in the middle ground, dwarfed by the surrounding landscape.

These large paintings are consistent with Anderson’s earlier oeuvre, yet come from an apparently different process of engagement with old masters and the gallery that contains them. They illustrate triumphantly the value of the artist-in-residence concept. This display charts a journey, a gradual sharpening of focus, a movement from outside the building to inside Soane’s famous Gallery, and finally a dive into the visual mind-worlds of two famous predecessors from which Anderson emerges reaffirmed as his own person with his individual language intact.

Ian Dejardin, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery