We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...
There's a really rather good exhibition of paintings by Doreen Fletcher on at the Nunnery Gallery. Who's Doreen Fletcher, you ask? And where's the Nunnery Gallery?
We're in Bow in east London, and we're looking at townscapes, virtually all of them of the local area. This is Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective, and this weekday lunchtime it's quite full of visitors, many of them from the East End, and clearly delighting in recognising landmarks that in some cases are now just history.
Doreen Fletcher has been painting the streets of east London since the 1980s, though she stopped working in the early 2000s for lack of recognition before resuming a couple of years ago after being rediscovered. And justifiably so.
She paints in a fairly precise documentary style that's full of detailed observation. Her pictures are by no means devoid of people, but they certainly don't play a central role. They might be in a car or at a bus stop, rarely taking centre stage.
There are echos of Edward Hopper, George Shaw, Ben Johnson, Dutch 17th-century city views and indeed the East London Group who recorded the capital between the wars.
"I am an artist interested in the pockets of life others ignore," Fletcher has said, and those words are inscribed high up on the wall of the main gallery here.
Rain-drenched tarmac, advertising hoardings, boarded-up shopfronts, a stray traffic cone, graffiti on railway bridges, a pink wheelie bin: There's a sort of urban poetry here.
Fletcher's more recent work continues in a similar vein. There's something very up-to-date about The Beckton Fox, on the prowl at the supermarket petrol station:
Hopper's Gas sprang immediately to mind!
This is a delightful show, even if you're not all that familiar with the East End. Doreen Fletcher's pictures are full of interest and anecdote. If you get the chance to head down to Bow in the next few weeks, it's well worth the trip.
She paints in a fairly precise documentary style that's full of detailed observation. Her pictures are by no means devoid of people, but they certainly don't play a central role. They might be in a car or at a bus stop, rarely taking centre stage.
"I am an artist interested in the pockets of life others ignore," Fletcher has said, and those words are inscribed high up on the wall of the main gallery here.
Fletcher's more recent work continues in a similar vein. There's something very up-to-date about The Beckton Fox, on the prowl at the supermarket petrol station:
This is a delightful show, even if you're not all that familiar with the East End. Doreen Fletcher's pictures are full of interest and anecdote. If you get the chance to head down to Bow in the next few weeks, it's well worth the trip.
Practicalities
Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective is on at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, east London until March 24. It's open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesday to Sunday, and admission is absolutely free. The Nunnery Gallery is just a few minutes' walk from both Bow Road station on the Underground's District and Hammersmith & City lines and Bow Church station on the Docklands Light Railway.
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I am an artist interested in the pockets of life others ignore
”
Images
Doreen Fletcher, Commercial Road, Whitsunday, 1989. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Bus Stop, 1983. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Salmon Lane in the Rain, 1987. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, The Beckton Fox, 2019. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Bus Stop, 1983. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, Salmon Lane in the Rain, 1987. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
Doreen Fletcher, The Beckton Fox, 2019. © Doreen Fletcher, courtesy Nunnery Gallery
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