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Showing posts from October, 2023

New Exhibitions in April

You may have noticed that it's the 250th anniversary of John Constable's birth this year, while JMW Turner was born 250 years ago last year and Thomas Gainsborough's 300th birthday falls in 2027. Put them all together and you get  Gainsborough, Turner and Constable: Inventing Landscape  at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk. This show, running from April 25 to October 11, explores the emergence of English landscape painting through three of its greatest exponents, and it features mostly rarely seen works from private collections -- including Turner's Abergavenny Bridge , which hasn't been on public display since 1799!  Meanwhile, the show that's just been on at Gainsborough's House --  Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk  -- transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, starting on April 4. On till November 1, the exhibition explores the pivotal role the time Spencer spent in Suffolk had on his career. You can read he...
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Opening and Closing in November

It's in the reign of King Henry VIII that English history seems to come to life, to become truly accessible. And part of that is down to the portraits of the royal family and the court by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, which retain an uncanny immediacy five centuries on. Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London will display the largest group of Holbein's works from the Royal Collection in more than 30 years, including over 40 of his sublime portrait drawings, of sitters such as Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Thomas More. It's on from November 10 until April 14. More works on paper at the Royal Academy, but from well over 300 years later: Degas, Cezanne, Morisot , van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec are all represented in Impressionists on Paper , which assembles 77 exhibits to show how the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists transformed art through other media as well as painting. This one runs from November 25 to March 10. November ...
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Black and White -- But Not Much Colour

Frans Hals is one of the three greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and if you go along to  Frans Hals  at the National Gallery in London, you'll understand why, hopefully. He was a master portraitist, who appears to have been able to apply paint to canvas almost without effort and to dazzling effect. That loose brushwork was a huge influence on artists in late 19th-century France. There are about 50 paintings in this exhibition, the first Hals retrospective for several decades, and they're mostly terrific.  And yet.... we found this show oddly underwhelming, surprisingly flat. The pictures are glorious, but the presentation seemed curiously contextless. Nowhere do you get a feel for the society in Holland and Hals's home city of Haarlem that allowed this upsurge in artistic creativity at the start of the 17th century, the bourgeoning capitalism, expanding middle class and economic growth that permitted all these men in up-to-the-min...
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