Cumbria's latest attraction: a Damien Hirst dead calf

An exhibition is placing works by great English painters such as Turner and Stubbs alongside pieces by controversial current artists such as Damien Hirst in aid of the ailing British countryside.

The Love, Labour and Loss exhibition brings together 120 representations of the countryside in Cumbria later this month, from the rural idyll depicted by Gainsborough to the more powerful forces of nature conveyed by Turner's Morning Among the Coniston Fells and Sunset on the Tamar.

The exhibition is intended to attract the tourists who have not returned in the same numbers to the area after the enforced absence due to foot- and-mouth disease last year.

A previously unexhibited bisected calf in formaldehyde by Hirst, The Prodigal Son, might attract the most interest at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle. The piece, from Hirst's own collection, is said to convey the renewal the return of lambing and calving has restored to the countryside since the end of the epidemic.

The artwork's appearance among exhibits worth a total of £50m will renew sheep farmers' soft spot for Hirst, whose work with a chainsaw and formaldehyde immortalised British livestock in the mid 1990s. "He's clever, there's no denying that. And he's a shrewd judge of a sheep. Anything that raises the profile of British lamb in times like these has to be good. Every little helps, you know," said one farmer after Hirst's work, Mother and Child Divided, won the 1995 Turner Prize.

The artist's empathy for farmers is inevitable, since his home is a farm with vast acreage in north Devon.

But the exhibition he has contributed to is not the first use of art to regenerate the North's agricultural economy. Barns across Cumbria and Lancashire have become eye-catching exhibition spaces in the ArtBarns project.

The new exhibition would explore agriculture's "centrality to the physical, cultural and commercial landscape of Britain over the last 300 years", Clive Adams, its curator, said. It conveys the sentimental, moral and spiritual interpretations of farming through works by Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti and Blake, before entering the "modern" realm of the past 100 years.

Alongside Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood and Karen Knorr will sit a newly commissioned series of works by the digital artist Daro Montag, featuring a DVD screening on plasma of a magnified foot-and-mouth disease bacilli.

The exhibition will show at the two counties worst affected by foot-and-mouth: at Carlisle from 20 July to 22 September; and at Exeter, Devon, in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery from 5 October 2002, to 4 January 2003.