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...
Some of the landscapes in Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire at the National Gallery in London are ravishing, but they carry more of a political subtext than you might expect, with messages that are still relevant today. Cole, the great American landscape artist of the early 19th century, was concerned by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in a United States making rapid advances into its as yet largely unsettled interior. His paintings contain warnings about the ecological costs of unchecked development. Perhaps we should know more about Cole, because he was actually born in Bolton in 1801, spent his early years working in textile mills in Lancashire and emigrated to the US with his family while still in his teens. But his paintings are largely in American collections, and that's where the 58 works on show at the National mostly come from. Cole was a self-taught painter, and he enjoyed early artistic success with bold views of the Catskill Mountains in New York state in...