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Showing posts from January, 2019

'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

So the question to ask about the  Michaelina Wautier  exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely.  She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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Opening and Closing in February

It's the 500th anniversary this year of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and to mark the occasion 144 drawings from the Royal Collection are being exhibited simultaneously in 12 museums across the UK. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  starts on February 1, with 12 works each on show at the Ulster Museum in Belfast,  Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery , Bristol Museum & Art Gallery , the National Museum in Cardiff, Derby Museum & Art Gallery , Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery , the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery , the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, Southampton City Art Gallery  and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens . Admission at most venues is free. Until May 6. All the drawings and more go on show at the Queen's Gallery in London starting in late May, with a selection at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from November. For something completely different, head for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Jeff Koons , ...
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Ruskin: The Surprisingly Modern Victorian at Two Temple Place

John Ruskin: a very Victorian figure in the history of art, but in many ways also a remarkably modern individual. A conservationist, a social commentator, a campaigner for the workers and the poor, and an early believer in the idea of gross national happiness. For Ruskin, a country's wealth was measured by the happiness of its people. It's the 200th anniversary of Ruskin's birth this year, and that's the spur for an exhibition at Two Temple Place in central London exploring his legacy. John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing  gives us the flavour of a remarkable but contradictory man, in a show that draws strongly on the collection of the museum he founded with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the metalworkers of Sheffield, educating them and helping them escape the smoke of the industrial city. There's a  Portrait of John Ruskin  by Charles Fairfax Murray, painted in 1875, around the time the museum opened, that's one of the first things you see as you ente...
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Bonnard at the Tate: Look Out for 1925

Pierre Bonnard's best pictures shimmer with colour, draw you in to daring compositions, hint at intimate domestic secrets or burst with the gorgeous flora of the south of France. When he was less on form, though, Bonnard could give you depressingly sludgy landscapes and not very interesting still lifes. There's lots that's attractive in Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory at Tate Modern in London, but there's also a fair chunk of work that comes across as a bit nondescript. You can see why he divided opinion -- Matisse thought he was fantastic, Picasso thought he was rubbish -- and why he still does. This extensive show starts off brightly enough, but a few rooms in, we were getting to feel somewhat underwhelmed by an excess of indistinct views of the green and brown foliage outside Bonnard's window and some rather murky townscapes. There's one picture that has St Tropez looking like the Lake District on a wet weekend. And then, metaphorically speaking, th...
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Dinner with the Dickenses: God Bless Us Every One

"Please, sir, I want some more," said Oliver Twist, in that most famous of lines by Charles Dickens. The workhouse boy was desperate for enough gruel, but Dickens' work as a whole overflows with references to food and drink. And, as  Food Glorious Food ,  the latest exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum in London shows, it played just as central a role in the Victorian writer's own life. The museum occupies the house at 48 Doughty Street that Dickens and his family moved into in 1837 and where he wrote  Oliver Twist and  The Pickwick Papers . It's the dining room that's the first you step into on your tour, with the table set for entertaining on a lavish, but not too lavish, scale. Dickens wasn't comfortable with grand dinner parties, depicting them, as in Dombey and Son , as frosty occasions where the bad behaviour of the servants reflected the flaws of their employers. The Victorian middle classes didn't do their own cooking, of course; the...
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Cyril Mann: From the Shadows to the Sun at The Lightbox

Just before Christmas, we discovered Cyril Mann 's astonishing Solid Shadow Paintings  at Piano Nobile in west London. So the chance to see the wider range of this forgotten British artist's work at The Lightbox in Woking -- an impressive venue we'd never visited before -- wasn't one we were going to pass up. Cyril Mann: Painter of Light and Shadow  seeks to tell the story of a troubled artist who embraced a variety of styles during his career. Born in London in 1911, Mann grew up in Nottingham and became the youngest ever recipient of a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art at the age of 12. He spent time in Canada before returning to study at the Royal Academy and then went to Paris to train under the Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson, painter of that bacchanalian extravaganza Les eus . Mann was always interested in the effects of sunlight and shadow, and among the exhibits in this show is a notebook from 1937 recording his observations. The shadow side of the...
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Strawberry Hill's 18th-Century Splendours Revived

If you've never been to Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole's Gothic mansion in south-west London, there may never be a better opportunity than now to get a taste of its past splendours. And if you have been, it's time to visit again to see the Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill , an exhibition that brings back to the house many of the works of art that were part of one of the greatest collections of the 18th century.  Walpole, the son of Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, revived the Gothic style when he built Strawberry Hill between 1748 and 1790. His collection, ranging from paintings and sculptures to historical curiosities, was dispersed in an auction in 1842. More than 150 objects have been reassembled for this show after a three-year hunt by the curators through private and public collections.   The show revives memories of the 2013 exhibition that saw Houghton Hall in Norfolk rehung with 60 of Sir Robert Walpole's paintings, which...
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Royalty & the Romanovs: A History Lesson at the Queen's Gallery

Britain and Russia don't enjoy the easiest of relationships. Espionage, assassination and mutual mistrust seem to be the order of the day. But in the time of the Tsars, the two countries' royal families cultivated friendly ties and became linked by marriage. That is the subject of Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs   at the Queen's Gallery in London.  It all started with Peter the Great, the first Russian ruler to set foot on English soil in 1698. He stayed for three months, meeting King William III and finding out among other things about how to build ships as he sought to open up Russia to the West. On departure, Peter presented William with his portrait, painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Kneller's one of the few artists in this exhibition you may actually have heard of. Shows at the Queen's Gallery provide a chance to put on public display works from the Royal Collection. There was a Canaletto exhibition in 2017, and starting in May you'll be able to ...
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Monarch of the Glen: Kitsch or Classic?

So, is Sir Edwin Landseer's  The Monarch of the Glen  a glorious evocation of the Scottish Highlands, or just a dreadful piece of Victorian kitsch? Or maybe both.... You have the chance to decide in a display at the National Gallery in London centred on one of the world's best-known animal paintings. What we learn from this small but extremely informative show, which is free of charge, is that Landseer was an highly accomplished artist who was as dedicated as George Stubbs to recreating animals on canvas. Stand in front of the Monarch of the Glen  here and you will see what is certainly a stupendous image, one that wouldn't have lasted 170 years if it didn't resonate with viewers and stick in the memory. A few words about the history of this picture: It was originally painted to hang in the House of Lords dining room, but the funding ran short, and instead it was exhibited in the Royal Academy, then sharing the National Gallery building, in 1851. The image was much...
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