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Showing posts from April, 2022

A Meagre Serving of Derby's Finest

If you're thinking about seeing  Wright of Derby: From the Shadows  at the National Gallery in London, be warned: There's not a huge amount to this show. The gallery describes it as "the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s 'candlelight' paintings". Major? There are actually only 10 of Joseph Wright's oil paintings in this smallish display, and while they certainly include some of his finest, it's not a lot for your money.   Especially as the star attraction is  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , Wright's masterpiece of 1768, which you can usually see for free just yards away in another room in the gallery, in rather less cramped circumstances. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's an astonishing painting, somehow encapsulating the 18th-century Enlightenment -- the advance of reason and science -- in one image. Whenever we're in the National Gallery we almost always stop by to look at it for a minute or two.  There is...
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Opening and Closing in May

It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer  or Caspar David Friedrich . Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4.  We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen . Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out? A fre...
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Glimmers from the Mists of Prehistory

There's stone, bone, bronze and, extraordinarily given that these objects are thousands of years old, a surprising amount of wood. But it's the gold that steals the show in  The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum in London.  Between 1900 and 1600 BC -- yes, almost 4000 years ago, and that's quite a concept to get your head round -- craftsmen were able to create this remarkable gold cape , which was uncovered by workmen in North Wales in 1833.  It's a stunning object in its own right, beautiful and mysterious. Imagine the sunlight glinting on it as the person who wore it -- and they must have been someone of great rank or status -- displayed it to.... whom? Worshippers, subjects? On some great day of celebration, presumably. On the other hand, the wearer would have been unable to move his or her upper arms....  Enormous skill and hard work went into its making, those patterns beaten out with only the most basic of tools. And consider the wealth it must have ta...
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