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Showing posts from October, 2024

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 November

We're starting in London this month with a double helping of Renaissance Italy: From November 9, the Royal Academy has Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 , when the three briefly crossed paths in the Tuscan city. While sculpture and painting feature in this display of more than 40 works, the emphasis appears to be very much on creations on paper, as it is in Drawing   the Italian Renaissance at the King's Gallery, which opens on November 1. This show, which also includes Titian, promises the widest range of drawings dating from around 1450 to 1600 ever to be displayed in the UK, with about 160 by more than 80 artists. The RA exhibition closes February 16, that in the King's Gallery on March 9.  As the Renaissance in southern Europe was coming to an end, a new Golden Age was starting in India, that of the Mughal Emperors. The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence at the Victoria and Albert Museum will display paintings, jewellery, clothing and more ...
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Two Years in Provence

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery in London -- heavily hyped and certainly extremely popular. So is it worth the fairly hefty ticket price? Very much so. This is a beautifully put-together illustrated narrative of the two years Vincent spent in Provence, the peak period of his short career, from early 1888 to spring 1890. There are major paintings from galleries far and wide, and pictures you may never have seen before from private collections. It's not a big show -- only 61 works, just under a quarter of which are on paper -- but it is gorgeous.  From the National's description of the exhibition, with its reference to "bringing together your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe," you might be expecting an all-encompassing retrospective. But there are no pictures from the start of Vincent's artistic life in the Netherlands, from his time in Paris, or from his last few weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise before he died of self-inflicted g...
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