"Silence is golden," according to the proverb, but the stillness in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi is distinctly white, charcoal, and every shade of grey in between. However, there's nothing dull about the Dane's restricted palette, as we were able to appreciate, not for the first time, in Hammershøi: The Eye that Listens at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. His subject matter -- so often sparsely decorated rooms in which the doors, windows and light sources become focal points -- is mesmerising. This picture -- Sunbeams or Sunlight. Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams. Strandgade 30 -- is so very typical. Apparently empty, lacking any subject matter -- just one wall of a room with a door, panelling and a window. Yet you are captivated by the illumination, and the space. Look how Hammershøi has depicted the light coming in through the window and on the frames round the panes. See how it casts a shadow on the jambs and follow th...
It's a beguiling, entrancing landscape, yet somehow also very reassuring. The year is 1918, and John Nash is back in England after many months of service on the Western Front in World War I, one of the few survivors from his company. While working by day on paintings to commemorate the conflict as an official war artist, in the evening he's able to leave the memories of the slaughter behind to work for himself, on pictures that purged the horror of the trenches. This is The Cornfield , and it's probably the stand-out painting in a really outstanding exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, John Nash: The Landscapes of Love and Solace , the first retrospective devoted to the life and work of the artist, the less well-known younger brother of Paul Nash, in more than half a century. You can see in this painting a fascination with shapes, patterns and shadows that characterises the best of Nash's landscapes: the angular forms of the row of corn sheaves, their edges highlighted by t...