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Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
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Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
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Underneath the Victorian Varnish

The old adage that a picture paints a thousand words is only true if you know the language being spoken. Take the Victorians; how many of their painted images appear to us at first glance so prim and proper, even twee. But beneath those buttoned-up, straight-laced exteriors, there lurks a deep, concealed well of emotion. To break through to the real significance, you need to translate the signs, decode the symbols whose meanings are no longer obvious to us.  What are they all trying to tell us, those ladies in bonnets, those cute animals, those flowers and climbing plants that you've seen when wandering through a room of Victorian paintings in a provincial museum? You can find out in  Telling Tales: The Story of Victorian Narrative Art  at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, an exhibition that reveals that British 19th-century art is as full of hidden meanings as those Dutch Golden Age interiors we love so much.  There are no really big names i...
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Leonardo Draws the Crowds Across the UK

The exhibitions of Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Royal Collection at 12 galleries around the UK are drawing such crowds that they are set to break attendance records. The show marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield has produced a "fantastic response", Museums Sheffield said this week. "In the first 19 days since we opened we’ve welcomed over 25,000 visitors through the doors, which sets it on track to become the Millennium Gallery’s most popular exhibition ever." Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery reported the highest daily attendance figures of the eight museums that responded to our inquiries. It saw 18,408 visitors in the first 12 days after the displays opened simultaneously around the country on February 1. Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery  also reported more than 1,150 visitors a day, with a cumulative total of 19,603 by February 17. The Ulster Museum in Belfast reported 16,576 visitor...
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William Stott: The Oldham Artist Who Impressed the French

A couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves getting increasingly exasperated by a late Victorian painting superstar, Edward Burne-Jones , in a show at Tate Britain that was full of knights in shining armour and damsels in distress. But British art was getting more modern. In the 1870s, James McNeill Whistler was already "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." And then a couple of years later, William Stott of Oldham came along. William Stott? Not exactly a household name, but he did paint one rather influential picture that's seen as key in the move to Impressionism and naturalism in British art in the 1880s. It's called Le Passeur (The Ferryman) , and it was bought by the Tate last year for £1.5 million. This beautiful work is now touring the country, and it's currently at Southampton City Art Gallery in a small but very well done (and free) exhibition called Beneath the Surface . It's well worth seeing. Confusingly, there seem to have been th...
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