What is it about Sussex, county of woods, water and chalky cliffs, which has inspired artists ever since one of the earliest carved the giant Long Man of Wilmington into the side of a hill?

Refuge, for one thing — a place to escape wartime persecution from across the Channel — and the kind of tolerance for a free-living lifestyle reflected in its major city, Brighton.

So it is no surprise that a handful of extraordinary Jews are among the stars of a new exhibition celebrating the county’s landscape, including photographer Dorothy Bohm and the Jazz Age painter known as Gluck.

“Sussex was very important to me,” says Bohm, who at 98 is once again exhibiting in the county where she arrived alone from Lithuania six decades ago.

“It meant a lot to my husband too. He wanted our children to have the chance to live in the country and not just in a town.”

Four photographs of Coneyhurst Farm, the beloved retreat where the photographer better known for her vibrant urban images spent weekends with her family for more than 20 years, stand testament to her appreciation of the trees, grass and orderly rows of crops that were the initial backdrop to her life after her 1939 arrival as a 14-year-old refugee clutching the camera her father had thrust into her hand as he waved her off to freedom.

Nearly three decades later, she returned to rural Sussex after her year at school in Ditchling. She worked in Manchester and lived with her husband in Paris, New York and London before she went along with his whim to buy a working farm in Sussex.

“They had it for more than 20 years, and only gave it up because it was hard to make money from it and we children had our own lives,” recalls Bohm’s daughter, Monica Bohm-Duchen, who found the selection of four small, still rural scenes for the new show at Chichester’s Pallant House surprisingly untypical, as there are no pictures with people.

Bohm only stopped taking photographs five years ago.

If Bohm’s photographs are the quietest in the show, the seascape by Gluck, born Hannah Gluckstein in 1895, is the most softly-spoken of the paintings. Gluck found freedom in Sussex to sport stylishly masculine clothes and have her hair cut by a barber.

Although she is better known for striking portraits and flower images, one of her landscapes attracted five times its estimate when it went for £4,300 at auction in 2016.

In this exhibition, The Wave is a tiny, tender celebration of surf breaking on the pebbled foreshore that the artist, whose brothers founded the J. Lyons tea-shop empire, called home from 1944 until her death in 1978.

GluckThe Wave

Gluck's The Wave

Tinier yet is the graphic painting of the funicular and fish lofts at Hastings by Hans Tisdall, like Bohm a German-born Jew, who changed his surname from Aufseeser in 1941.

Dorothy Bohm, West Sussex

Dorothy Bohm, West Sussex

A name change would have been unthinkable for Lucien Pissarro, son of the Jewish godfather of Impressionism, who was painting landscapes in Sussex before even the First World War was brewing in Europe.

But he managed to shock in his own way with his Cottage In Storrington, making a bold pointillist statement in 1911 only a year after this technique confounded London audiences in the seminal show Manet and the Post-Impressionists.

The organisers, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, would soon demonstrate their own unconventional side, becoming founder members of the Bloomsbury Set who made Sussex a byword for free living , set in glorious and timeless landscapes just a short train ride from the capital.

Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water is on show at Pallant House, Chichester until 23 April.